cover

Contents

Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Audrey Reimann
Title Page
Author’s Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Copyright

About the Book

Caroline Shrigley runs the Temperance Hotel alone, bringing up her younger sister Jane after the tragic death of their parents. The only man she ever loved was killed in the Great War, and Carrie is beginning to think her life will be nothing but work, chapel, and giving Jane all the advantages she never had.

Then Patrick Kennedy, a wild, handsome and passionate Irishman, turns her world upside down, and the life she’s dreamed of is finally within Carrie’s reach – until a devastating betrayal threatens to take it all away. Can there ever be happiness for a mill town girl…?

About the Author

Audrey Reimann was brought up in Macclesfield where she was educated at the Macclesfield Grammar School for Girls. She and her husband now live in East Lothian.

Audrey has three children and is the proud grandmother of ten, and has been variously a bank clerk, a nurse, a teacher, and a foster mother to twenty-five. But, above all, Audrey is a storyteller. On Anne Robinson’s BBC Two programme My Life in Books, comedian Sarah Millican named Audrey’s novel Flora’s War as one of her favourite books, saying: ‘This is a book that will make you laugh and make you cry.’

Also by Audrey Reimann

Flora’s War

The Runaway

Title page for Mill Town Girl

Author’s Note

For the purpose of storytelling, in The Runaway I altered the name of the town from Macclesfield to Middlefield, changed the names and even the direction of some of the main streets, missed out Jordangate completely and took far too many liberties with a lovely medieval town. But Macclesfield was in my mind when I wrote The Runaway and Mill Town Girl. This much will be evident to anyone brought up in that dear place of mills and markets and steep, cobbled streets down which a barrel of treacle once rolled; where once there dwelt a court jester called Maggoty Johnson; and a Saxon named Macca tilled his field.

In Mill Town Girl I have reverted to the real name of my hometown but all the locations and the characters in my story are imaginary.

Audrey Reimann

Chapter One

1919

Caroline Aurora Shrigley, known to everyone in Macclesfield as Miss Shrigley and to her young sister Jane only as Carrie, sat in her attic bedroom watching everything that went on in the market square. Had anyone asked, she would have described herself as being twenty-eight years old, unlovely and unloved and the owner and sole proprietor of the Temperance Hotel in the ancient Cheshire town.

It was five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in July and the sun was beating down, heating the smooth brown cobblestones under her window where ragged children from Churchwallgate, the steep hill that joined the top market to Waters Green and the cattle market below, were chalking pictures. At the other end of the square two courting couples were walking. They were circumspect, knowing full well that twenty or so pairs of eyes were following their progress, watching for anything, as Carrie herself was.

If Walter Stubbs hadn’t been killed at the battle of the Dardanelles, Carrie thought, she might have been walking out herself. Not that he’d said anything, but he always used to keep a nice bit of beef for her lodgers and on his last leave he’d sat beside her in chapel.

Young Annie Baker and Philip Gallimore had come into the square up the Hundred and Eight steps from the cattle market and bold as brass were linking arms and laughing. Mrs Gallimore would have trouble on her hands with that pair, in Carrie’s opinion. But it was Sunday and she should not harbour uncharitable thoughts. In another hour she’d be in chapel again. Still, she could not stop thinking about yesterday. Jane, her thirteen-year-old sister whom she’d brought up single-handed since their father died, had made a proper exhibition of herself.

The Sunday school’s anniversary treat had been the occasion. The chapel members always went to Jack Cooper’s farm at Rainow, in the foothills of the Pennines, for their annual picnic. The picnic was followed, in the evening, with a concert in the chapel’s meeting hall.

What had got into Jane, Carrie didn’t know. Normally, Jane hardly passed an opinion of her own that didn’t accord with Carrie’s, though Jane could be stubborn.

Jane’s pretty, heart-shaped face had a determined look about it. ‘Carrie,’ she’d said, on the charabanc, ‘I’m not going to recite at the concert.’

Carrie looked down at her. ‘You are,’ she said with quiet firmness. ‘You always recite.’ Then she quietly added, after looking round to see no one was listening. ‘I’ve spent good money on elocution lessons for you. You’ll do a poem. Like you always do.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Don’t answer back,’ Carrie ordered in a whisper. ‘There’s half the chapel here, watching.’

Jane said no more until they had climbed down and were seated by a dry-stone wall at Rainow, in a small hay meadow. The food was being carried from the charabanc by the chapel elders and their wives and there was a lot of merriment as the old wives, the bossy ones, tried to control the little children who were bouncing around and squealing with excitement. Other women were spreading white cloths over the trestle tables, bustling; trying to pretend that they were in charge when all of them knew that Mrs Gregson, the opinionated wife of a solicitor, was. You could hear Mrs Gregson barking out her orders five miles away, Carrie thought. Carrie let them get on with it. She didn’t believe in joining in and Mrs Gregson knew better than to ask her. She kept herself to herself; always had.

She turned to Jane. ‘What were you thinking of doing?’ she asked, brushing a fly from the navy skirt of her summer suit. ‘If you aren’t doing the recitation? Play the piano? You’re not as good on the piano as you are at reciting.’

‘I’m not doing anything,’ Jane said. ‘Not this year.’

‘Why? What’s up? Has someone been disp-dis– whatever it is about you?’

‘No, Carrie. No one’s been disparaging about me.’ Jane took off her straw hat and laid it on the grass beside her. ‘But the others of my age don’t have to do it any more – reciting and playing the piano,’ she said in a resolute voice.

Carrie’s voice went high when she was annoyed. ‘What do you mean? The others of your age don’t do it? What others?’ she asked. ‘Have they been callin’ you? They want a good tellin’ off, that’s what they want.’

‘I’ve told you, Carrie, that you don’t say “callin’ you” when you mean people are talking about you behind your back. It’s not proper grammar. That’s what they teach us at the elocution lessons,’ Jane answered.

‘All right, all right,’ Carrie cut in. The elocution lessons were worth paying for. Jane knew a lot. But she knew that Jane was trying not to answer her question. ‘What do they say then? What do they do to upset you?’

‘They laugh at me,’ Jane answered. ‘The boys – they tease me.’

‘Well, they’ve no right to. And you must take no notice. Have no truck with them.’

‘Yes, but . . .’ Jane started to say

Carrie was losing patience. ‘I sing,’ she said. ‘I sing at every concert. Father used to give the address and the epilogue. They expect it.’

‘Why should they expect it?’

‘We’re looked up to, Jane. We are what’s called pillars. Pillars of the chapel. Our great-grandfather Josiah Shrigley built the chapel.’

‘That doesn’t make any difference. I’m not reciting.’

There was no shade in the field and with her red hair and pale skin Carrie felt the heat more than most. She stood up and rummaged in her handbag for her glasses. She hated wearing them in public but she needed to see if the grass had stained her cream kid shoes. And she wanted to see Jane’s expression. She put them on carefully; the wire arms, though she’d wrapped lambswool around them, were inclined to rub the skin behind her ears, irritating and reddening it.

Jane looked defiant. ‘You can’t force me to recite, Carrie.’

Carrie made a great effort to control herself. There had been times lately when she felt she could strike Jane. She’d only done it once, years ago, and been sorry afterwards. Now she drew in her breath sharply. ‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘Later. Come on. Let’s get our tea.’

Jane had been perfectly well behaved at the picnic and on the ‘chara’ going back, though Carrie would not have noticed if Jane had been peeved. Carrie did not profess to have what some women claimed to have; a sixth sense or any such rubbish. She was a sensible, down-to-earth woman and didn’t go in for any of that. No, she kept herself to herself, kept Jane right and they were held in esteem by the Macclesfield people, as their father had been. It was simply a matter of putting your duty first. Father had impressed it upon her. He’d told her that if you want to rise in the world, be respected, be an important person in the town – and she did – you never give any cause for gossip, especially in a town that’s rife with it.

It had been too hot in the field and she’d been glad to be driven back to town when the sun went down. She looked forward to the concert.

The meeting hall was cool and she and Jane sat at the back at the end of a row of rush-seated chairs. The door behind them was open on to the street and a light draught of air played across her shoulders and ankles, like a caress, she thought. Jane had fidgeted a lot.

‘Keep still, Jane,’ she whispered. ‘You’ll make me miss my turn.’

‘What are you singing, Carrie?’ Jane asked in a loud whisper.

‘“The Last Rose of Summer”,’ she replied, putting her finger to her lips, ‘in the first half, then “Behold Me Standing at the Door”. What are you reciting? “The Charge of the Light Brigade”?’

To Carrie’s embarrassment and annoyance and in defiance of all she’d been taught, Jane pushed back her chair and ran from the hall. Everyone stared at them. What could she have said? She’d never know how she kept her composure or how she lied to the chapel elders, saying Jane had been overcome with the heat. She’d never know how she’d got through her own songs, apologised for Jane and left the concert hall, only to find her sister, all smiles and contrition, waiting up for her with a peace offering of a nice pot of Mazawattee tea and some Osborne biscuits.

She’d said no more about it at the time. Maybe it had been the heat. Anyway it was quite uncharacteristic of Jane.

But that was yesterday. It was just as hot today, here at her window overlooking the square.

Carrie let her eyes go over the heads of Annie Baker and Philip Gallimore to the town hall, a fine sandstone building with Palladian columns. Walter’s name was on the big roll of honour in there. Two polished oak roll-of-honour boards nearly filled one wall of the assembly room, bearing the names of those who fell; all in gold letters, all in alphabetical order; so many names. Nearly all the young men in the town had gone.

Those who had returned were changed by the horrors they’d lived through. A lot had been gassed; they could only walk a few steps before they had to stop, cough and spit. There were men with arms and legs gone and most of these men, with no jobs to go to, were bitter. One or two had been shell-shocked and they were, in a way, the worst, carrying their wounds inside their heads.

Carrie understood that. She felt for the shell-shocked. She’d seen nothing of life outside the narrow world she inhabited but she’d seen her mother and father die. She’d been left to bring up her young sister and to struggle to make a living for them from the lodging house. She was already an old maid. There were plenty of old maids too, after a war, she knew. But there were times when she wondered if she also was becoming bitter, for inside, she felt herself to be young with moods that swung from the wild and fanciful to the hopeless.

She had to conceal these moods; she had to pretend to a control she knew she lacked. Her father had said, many times, that she lacked moderation. She wished with all her heart to be a worthy successor to him; wished that she could be like the few who had returned from the war unscathed. But even they, the ones who came through it without any outward sign, seemed to be determined to forget; filling every spare minute with activity, wanting it all; wanting it now, like her two Irish lodgers.

All at once she heard a commotion and turned her head to see the Kennedy brothers crossing over the market square from the Swan, carrying cases.

‘When Irish eyes are smiling . . .’ the big one was singing.

Carrie – and probably everyone in the square – could hear them as they came to a noisy halt, looking up at her window. ‘All the world seems bright and gay . . .’ He was out of tune an’ all and his brother was holding on to his arm, encouraging him.

What sort of hotel would the neighbours think she ran? Carrie put her head out of the open window. ‘If you two have been drinking . . . If Douglas McGregor’s been giving you drink, you can take your bags right back,’ she called.

‘Oh, we’ve not been drinking. Indeed we’ve not!’ Patrick Kennedy was looking up at her with eyes full of laughter. He flourished his cap in the air. ‘We’ve been collecting our luggage. Haven’t we, Danny me lad?’ Danny, smaller and younger, tugged his brother’s sleeve in warning but she saw that he was on the brink of laughter as well.

‘You’ve been here for two weeks. Why have you still got stuff over at the Swan?’ she snapped. ‘Don’t stand there with everyone listening. Come in quietly. It’s Sunday.’

She returned to her seat. Sunday didn’t matter to them; they were Roman Catholics. They went to mass on Sunday mornings and that was it. They might have been drinking, round the back at the Swan. She wouldn’t put it past them. Roman Catholics could get away with anything as long as they went and confessed. Then they could start all over again, sinning afresh.

Douglas McGregor, who kept the Swan, was a Catholic an’ all. He and his wife had come to Macclesfield last December, just after the Armistice. He’d been followed, soon after, by the Kennedy brothers. He’d been in the navy with the older one, Patrick Kennedy.

Apart from the McGregors being Roman Catholics she had nothing against them. And her father used to say, ‘There’s good and bad in everyone. Even Roman Catholics.’ The McGregors were respectable like herself. Douglas McGregor had joined the Macclesfield Choral Society. He was a serious singer. And the best tenor they’d got. It was a pity he’d sent the Irishmen over to her, that was all.

She should be getting ready for chapel but she stayed a little longer at the window. She liked to sit in her attic bedroom. It was the nicest room in the house and she had the best view of the square from here, on the short side.

The Temperance Hotel was at the corner where Churchwallgate drops steeply down round the church wall, behind the ancient church of St Michael and All Angels, to the cattle market below. The main roads of Macclesfield all begin in the market square. Mill Street, the steep hill at the other corner of the block from the Temperance Hotel, slopes downwards towards the river Bollin. Cotton and silk mills line the riverbanks all the way along to the cattle market and beyond.

The other main street, Chestergate, came into the square past the Swan. She couldn’t see the Pennine hills from here; the church tower was in the way.

Sunday afternoon was the only time the square was quiet. She wondered if Jane was home yet. She hadn’t seen her come in. Her sister’s bedroom was along the top landing from hers and Jane generally popped her head round the door when she came upstairs.

At chapel this morning the text had been, ‘The pomp and vanities of this wicked world and all the sinful lusts of the flesh’. Pride and vanity were sins. Everyone knew that. The minister said that drinking was a sinful lust. And it was, or why should her father have opened the Temperance Hotel? Her father had taught her all about sin.

Did enjoying food count as a lust of the flesh? She was fussy about food and could only eat what she had cooked or had supervised in its preparation. She had a good appetite but it had dropped off lately, since the Kennedy brothers arrived. She’d never have taken them in, only business was bad and Douglas McGregor said they were fine men.

He’d told her they were looking for cheaper rooms than they had at the Swan. But they never seemed to stick to their own rooms. They were always under her feet when they came in from their work – always around her, especially the older one who kept coming into the kitchen when she was cooking and putting her off her food.

It didn’t matter. She’d been putting a bit of weight on before and was glad it had gone. It was the first time she’d been able to feel her ribs. Carrie put her hand under her blouse, feeling the dampness where it gathered beneath her full breasts. Oh, it was hot. She wore nothing under the blouse and she took hold of the edge and flapped it gently to cool herself. She liked the feel of silk next to her skin. She wouldn’t change her things for chapel and it was far too hot to wear stays or a bust bodice. Nobody would see the outline of her when she had her coat on.

She could hear them downstairs, laughing and joking on Sundays. Roman Catholics! She didn’t think much of Church of England folk either; the folk who went to St Michael’s. They were nearly as bad as Roman Catholics with their pomp and show. At the chapel they didn’t go in for all that – all that parading, bobbing up and down, cross bearing and white-gowned choirboys.

She was in the chapel choir. Nobody bent the knee at chapel. Everyone was as good as everyone else. God didn’t expect people to bow. There were no graven images to bow to in chapel. And St Michael’s church bells were always going. It was all right for them on the far side of the square but she had to shut her windows on Sunday mornings to keep the noise down.

Mind, she was always having to shut her windows for one thing or another, flanked as she was by the shops. On her left as you looked at it from the front was the drysalter and chandlery run by the Carter family, and on the right was Potts Bros, high-class grocer. Between the two, Carrie thought, as she regarded the square, it was hard to say which was worse. Not that she went in for neighbouring.

On Mondays and Tuesdays the kitchen window had to be kept shut when Frank Carter took delivery of paraffin and molasses and used his backyard to tip them into jars and bottles. She couldn’t abide the smell of that place. Still, it pleased her to think how Frank Carter wanted to buy the Temperance Hotel. He’d told her he was thinking of opening a chemist’s and pharmacy as well. He’d started making up his own medicines and was doing a good trade, but he could look elsewhere for more space. She wasn’t selling.

Wednesdays were noisy and smelly, with the market stalls right up to her front door, as were Saturdays. On Thursdays and Fridays she had to keep the front windows closed when Potts Bros set their coffee roaster going. They had a big, red-painted iron furnace in the room next to her house and didn’t seem to mind folks looking in, for there was nothing up at the window. People stopped and watched Herbert Potts, red faced and half dressed, shovelling hot coals and roasting beans all day long, filling the square with throat-catching fumes. They had a big grinder in there – a noisy object – and always one of the assistants turning the handle.

The Potts brothers wanted to buy her hotel as well. They wanted a bigger shop. They kept hinting that if ever she wanted to sell . . . They’d have to come down to earth; they’d been charging too much for everything when the war was on. And they hadn’t put their prices down since.

Some people – people here in Macclesfield, people like the Potts brothers and the Carters – hadn’t done too badly out of the war if they’d money to offer for her hotel. She hadn’t done well. Lodgings before the war were fourteen shillings a week, now she could charge eighteen and six but she couldn’t always get the lodgers. It hadn’t been easy. But she’d managed. And she wouldn’t sell. Father had opened the Temperance Hotel. It had been a declaration of faith to her father; a Haven of Temperance and Sobriety he’d called it. He’d had a way with words.

The square was deserted now. All the windows in the Temperance were open to let in the cooling, heather-scented breeze that was blowing off the hills and moor, billowing the net curtains gently into the rooms.

Carrie left the window and crossed to her washstand. It had brass inlays on the legs. She liked nice furniture and had the best bits here in her room, where she could keep her eyes on them. By the other window, the one that looked over the yard, was her kidney-shaped dressing table. She’d had it done out in white cotton lawn with blue satin ribbons. She always kept something scented on it. Today a bowl of cabbage roses filled the attic with their sweet perfume.

She unpinned and combed back her thick, red hair, pulling it hard, away from her face, twisting and turning it until the unruly, abundant mass was pinned into a severe, heavy knot at the back of her neck. She looked at herself in the oval mirror above the washstand as she fastened her mother-of-pearl side-combs against her temples. She was tall and full-figured; high cheekbones in a long face, too large a mouth, good white teeth and large, round, short-sighted eyes of deep sapphire blue.

Sometimes, when she looked at herself, she was startled out of her wits by the expression and luminosity of those eyes. Then she would remember her father and the way he used to tell her that vanity was the deadliest sin of them all. ‘Pride and vanity’, he used to say, ‘go before a fall.’ So she had grown up wondering where pride ended and vanity began and not being sure if pride and self-respect weren’t two sides of the same coin.

Anyway, it was safer to regard herself as plain – not to give herself airs; not to feel pride in hair that was blazing with colour and life – not to notice the milky whiteness of her unblemished skin. It was safer to put such vanities out of mind as unworthy of the god-fearing, purposeful woman her father had intended her to be; it was safer to think of herself as exceptionally plain.

She did nothing on a Sunday but attend chapel morning and evening, and teach Sunday school in the afternoon. For the other six days she laboured, running the lodging-house. But six days shalt thou labour, the Bible said. It was the word of the Lord and she kept to it as her parents had done; the Ways of Righteousness, her father would have said.

Father hadn’t allowed them even to speak of anything but religious matters on Sundays. He taught her to speak only of pure and simple things on Sundays but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t control her thoughts, which strayed from the pure and simple.

But she could never do as some did. She was upright. She had strong principles. And it was a constant reminder, living so near to Churchwallgate, of how low folks could sink. Just below her hotel, only a few yards from the respectability of the square, lived some of the poorest families in the town, in filthy conditions with filthy smells that made your stomach heave to walk by. They weren’t all like that. But it was hard for people like Mrs Gallimore who lived halfway down, on Churchwall Street. Mrs Gallimore was proud and clean. It was hard for her, trying to keep her house and family right when there were so many dirty folk around her.

Carrie opened her bedroom door and looked down the landing. Where was Jane? After Sunday school she’d gone for a walk in the park and Carrie hadn’t heard her return. Perhaps she was downstairs talking to Mrs Bettley who came on Sundays to help the girl who did the bedrooms. Mrs Bettley put out a cold supper for the lodgers on Sundays for no cooking was done on the Day of Rest. It didn’t cost much extra and Mrs Bettley wasn’t Chapel so she could work.

‘I’m getting slack with our Jane,’ Carrie said to herself as she went back into the room for her hat and coat. ‘I should make her come to chapel with me. I think she only goes to Sunday school so she can go sauntering round West Park afterwards. She’s thirteen. It’s time she started to act like a young woman instead of going round with that crowd, parading round the bandstand in their Sunday best and leaving their elders’ sides to go wandering in the cemetery.’

She’d better find out what Jane was up to. Jane ought to do nothing but Bible study on Sundays, as she herself had. Recently Jane had taken up drawing and painting, Danny Kennedy’s hobby. Drawing and painting was all right if you had a minute or two to spare on a weekday but Carrie was sure Father wouldn’t have approved of it on a Sunday and Mother would have agreed. Mother had been a saint.

She pinned on a green straw hat that went with her summer coat. The coat was cut in a restrained style with black collar and lapels. It was long, down to her ankles. She didn’t like the new short skirts the younger ones were wearing. Her gloves were in the hallstand drawer, downstairs. Carrie dosed her door and went down.

Maggie Bettley was in the hall. ‘The older one,’ Maggie jerked her head towards the parlour, ‘the big Irishman. He wants to see you.’

‘Is Jane back?’ Carrie asked sharply. She’d be late for chapel if she didn’t watch out.

‘Yes, Miss Shrigley. She’s having her tea in the dining room, with the lodgers.’

‘With the lodgers?’ Carrie’s voice went high.

The sound of it had brought the older Kennedy to the parlour door.

‘May I speak to you, Miss Shrigley?’ he asked in his deep, lilting voice.

‘I can spare you a minute,’ Carrie answered. She turned to Mrs Bettley. ‘Tell our Jane to get her Bible study done after tea. I don’t want her sitting around with the lodgers.’

Maggie scuttled back up the corridor to the kitchen. The hall was dark and Carrie caught her sleeve against an umbrella handle that one of the lodgers had left turned outwards She’d need to start wearing her glasses all the time.

In the parlour, Patrick Kennedy stood by the fireplace in front of the painted fire-screen, his bold eyes trying to hold her gaze.

‘What is it?’ she asked. She’d not say any more about him singing in the square. It was himself he made look foolish. But his manner always made her feel uncomfortable, aware of herself. Her heartbeat seemed to step up whenever he came near. ‘Can’t it wait till tomorrow? It’s Sunday.’

‘It can. It can,’ he answered with a smile. He was a handsome man with dancing blue eyes; tall with brown, curling hair that was a bit too long. He was four years older than herself and about six years older than his brother, Danny.

At this moment he had struck a devil-may-care pose, resting one large hand on the polished mantel. ‘I need some advice from a woman,’ he said. ‘It’s about the houses I’m building. I thought,’ – it sounded like ‘taut’ the way he said it – ‘I thought that I’d design the kitchens to suit the ladies.’

‘All right. I’ll see you after chapel,’ she said. ‘I’m late.’

As she hastened down Chestergate to the chapel, Carrie found she was thinking continuously about Patrick Kennedy. He had an air, an aura, about him she’d never known on any man before and she wondered if she were a little afraid of him. It was probably because he was Roman Catholic, she decided. You never knew what went on in those places where they prayed to saints, fiddled with beads and lit candles. It was horrible thinking about it.

She went as fast as she could. She could not go in late to the choir stalls. They’d all be whispering, all the women, and wanting to know what had kept her. That time Walter had sat next to her all the tongues had started wagging. She knew they had. And there hadn’t been an understanding or anything. Even if he’d spoken, she wasn’t sure that marriage was what she’d wanted. Father had never wanted her to get married; he’d told her so.

She’d read all about marriage in those books – some she’d sent for and some the minister’s wife had lent her soon after Walter Stubbs had shown an interest. It had been a real eye-opener. She still couldn’t get over it – the minister’s wife having books like that, with coloured pictures of insides and men’s parts. You’d never think it. The minister’s wife was that prim and proper.

Marriages, true marriages, one man and one woman joined for life in the sight of God, were made in heaven any road, so she’d missed her chance when Walter had been killed. All the same, she couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like – a man doing those things. Loving you.

And what was she doing anyway, thinking about marriage and understandings when all he wanted, all Patrick Kennedy wanted, was to talk about back kitchens! As if she knew or cared about kitchens. They were just rooms with a tap, a sink, a cooking stove and a table. Perhaps he was going to put gas stoves in the posh houses they were building. That’d be it. He’d want to see how her gas stove worked.

She got there in time and filed into the choir stalls after the others. She was the tallest so she stood at the back. But the service was slow. Everything seemed to be dragging along tonight. Alderman Cecil Ratcliffe – he had a big shoe shop on Mill Street – lay preacher, a bit of a know-all, had given the sermon. It had been on a text from Proverbs, ‘Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.’

Someone else could have made more of that, an’ all. Someone with a bit of fire. Someone like her father. She liked good, rousing sermons where the preacher looked into your eyes, pointing his finger and thundering in a deep voice.

Cecil Ratcliffe had a weak voice. He was tall and thin and stood with his back to the choir so that all she could see of him was the back of his narrow neck and his hands, white-knuckled, tense, on the edge of the pulpit.

Anyway, she knew what tomorrow would bring forth for her. Just the same as every Monday and nothing to boast about. She was glad they didn’t go in for pomp and show at chapel, no processions or anything. As soon as the last hymn was over she’d slip out by the side door. She didn’t want to stand around outside, gossiping.

At last. ‘Hymn number four hundred and twenty-two,’ Cecil Ratcliffe said in his considered, light tones, ‘“Blessed Assurance”.’

Good. It was a short hymn and she liked the ones with a refrain. The organ wheezed for the introduction and they all stood. ‘Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine: O what a foretaste . . .’ Her mind went back to the afternoon. ‘Design the kitchens to suit the ladies!’ he’d said. Design them indeed! ‘Of glory divine . . .’

She wondered if he’d be in the parlour still. He and Danny generally went for a walk after supper. ‘Heir of salvation, purchase of God’. He’d asked once or twice if she’d like a walk an’ all. ‘Born of the spirit, washed in his blood . . .’

Being Irish he’d not see what that would mean to the folk who sat in their upstairs windows watching all that went on – if she went for a walk with a man.

‘This is my stor-ee . . .’ she sang.

Courting couples went walking, down Mill Street and along the canal banks to the aqueduct – ‘Th’Accadoc’, the locals called it.

‘This is my song . . .’

But she’d never been. ‘Praising my Saviour all the day long.’

Chapter Two

It was light outside and only half-past eight. Carrie went quickly back to the square.

He opened the front door to her. Patrick Kennedy did. Her own front door. She’d tell him about that. She wouldn’t have her lodgers taking liberties. She was sick of it, the way he disconcerted her. He had a funny smell as well. People did, everyone had their own smell only his was more noticeable. Now her heart was going nineteen to the dozen again, making her choke for breath. She gave him a stern look. ‘Where’s Jane?’ she asked when the door was closed behind her.

‘In the parlour,’ he said, as bold as you like. ‘She’s copying a chapter of the Bible, like you said. Me brother’s in there too, reading.’

Carrie opened the parlour door and saw Jane, little and childish where she sat at the window table, push a sheet of drawing paper inside her Bible hurriedly. ‘I’m copying out, Carrie,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to make you a cup of tea?’

‘No. Sit down. I’ll do it meself,’ Carrie told her. ‘But you should be in the living room or the kitchen. You know I keep this room for the lodgers.’ She glanced over at Danny Kennedy who promptly put down his book and leapt to his feet.

‘I’ll leave,’ he said.

Carrie saw Jane blush with embarrassment. ‘Stay where you are,’ she said. ‘It’s not important. Don’t make a habit of it, that’s all.’

She thought she’d hang her coat up and put a cardigan on – she’d gone chilly – before she made the tea but, when she turned into the hall, Patrick Kennedy was at the foot of the stairs, blocking her way. She’d have to brush against him if she wanted to get past –so she’d not go up.

‘Would you like to take a turn around the square with me, Miss Shrigley?’ he asked.

Carrie looked sharply at him. ‘I can’t do that,’ she said, then all at once, not wanting him to see that she had put a different interpretation on his invitation from that which he’d meant, she reddened and turned away, making for the corridor and kitchen in her best coat.

At the end of the corridor was a small living room that held a deal table, two upholstered armchairs and a cooking range, which she only lit in the winter. She took off her hat and coat and placed them over an armchair.

Beyond the living room was the wide and shallow kitchen, a tacked-on addition to the house. She filled the iron kettle at the sink, which was set at one end, and crossed the stone-flagged floor to put it on the gas stove at the other side. It was dark and cold. The walls hadn’t been whitewashed for as long as she could remember. She’d never been able to do it nor had enough money to pay anyone to do it for her. Above the gas stove, next to the matches, was a square tea-caddy and a large earthenware teapot.

As soon as the kettle boiled, Carrie reached for the wooden tray, which was kept beside the stove, placed the filled teapot on it and carried it to the living room where she set it on the table.

Patrick Kennedy was there, in her living room. There was a dining room for the lodgers next to the parlour. She drew in her breath sharply. ‘I’ve told you before. This part of the house is private,’ she said, all snippy, to show him.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Don’t be angry with me. Oh, Caroline Aurora! You’re too young to be acting like an old maid.’

‘How dare you!’ Carrie felt colour flood into her face. Anger and embarrassment joined to inflame her. ‘You’ve been following me about. Haven’t you?’ she demanded.

He closed the door behind him and smiled widely, unconcerned at her outrage. ‘Carrie,’ he said in the low, musical way he had. ‘Have you no feelings?’

Then his hands were on her shoulders, pressing her arms down against her sides. She had no idea what to do. He was in earnest. She saw that his eyes were full of desire. Suddenly she twisted under his hands, stepped back and struck him, hard across the side of the head.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she shouted. ‘You leave my house. Go! Go!’

Her left hand came up and caught him over the mouth, catching him off-balance, making him fall backwards, knocking the teapot as he stumbled. Then to Carrie’s horror the brown pot turned on its side, the lid clattered to the floor and boiling liquid poured down on to Patrick’s neck as he dropped to his knees.

‘Holy Mother of God!’ he yelled, leaping to his feet, pushing her aside, running, steaming into the kitchen.

What had she done? Perhaps he hadn’t been going to . . . Oh, heavens. ‘Patrick!’ she cried, running now behind him to the sink, panicking at the sight of injury. Her hands shook as she turned the tap and cupped cold water in them, tipping it over his neck. His head was low over the sink and he was groaning as she doused a dishcloth under the tap and placed it on the scalded skin.

‘Take your coat off,’ she said, her voice catching in her throat with fear. ‘Here. I’ll do it.’ With trembling fingers she unbuttoned his tweed jacket and tried to ease his poor burnt arm through the sleeve.

And it was off and he’d stopped moaning, and he’d slipped his good arm around her waist, and his fingers were sliding under her blouse upwards until they reached her breast. And it was as if his hand was electric or something, and he was holding her hard up against himself. He smelt of coal-tar soap and leather and her head was reeling with the scent of him.

His face was wet and his wet mouth was on hers, and the banging of her heart was not from fear but from a sudden leaping response that was coming to her as if she’d known all along that this was the way it would be. That she’d gladly leave the Paths of Righteousness, when she found a man to love.

At half-past eleven on Christmas Eve that same year of 1919, a twenty-four-year-old Scotsman, Douglas McGregor, stood at an upstairs window of the Swan, one of the oldest coaching inns in Cheshire. The Swan, left to him by a childless aunt, faced the town hall across the cobbled market square. Next to the town hall was the church of St Michael and All Angels whose muffled bell was tolling slowly, calling worshippers to the late service.

The moon was high, the night was brilliant with stars and the church bell-tower made a sharp outline against the distant mountains. People crossed the gas-lit square in twos and threes and, from where he stood, Douglas McGregor could have seen, through the open church door, a line of ornate, gilded chandeliers hanging from the high reaches of the vaulted roof on long brass chains. Each one held aloft a hundred or more small flames, lit to celebrate a birth so long ago.

Douglas saw none of it. His brown eyes were blurred with tears. His new-born son’s lusty cries coming from the next room could not compensate for the loss of Jeannie, who had slipped so quietly and quickly into death minutes after the baby was delivered.

The priest had gone after baptising the baby in case it did not live. He’d named the child Alan, with Patrick Kennedy as the child’s only godparent. By now the priest would be preparing to celebrate mass at St Alban’s and in a minute Dr Walker would leave childbed and deathbed and find him waiting here. The doctor would have no comfort to offer and McGregor knew this, but ‘Why?’ he wanted to ask, ‘Why Jeannie? Why so young? She was nineteen. I survived four years of war, two torpedo attacks. I came home to Jeannie and a life of a fisherman. I believed that risk and peril were things of the past.’ The image of his dead wife, white and expressionless, swam before his eyes. Then he remembered Jeannie’s face as it had been, when, little more than a year ago, they had first set eyes on the Swan.

It had taken them two days to travel from their Scottish village to Macclesfield, an ancient town built on an escarpment at the foot of the Pennine hills. It was night when the train halted at the station in Macclesfield’s cattle market. Facing them was the steep rise of Churchwallgate, which, with the nearby ancient steps, linked the two markets. The Swan, they knew, was in the market place at the town’s highest point. Their instructions were to walk up Churchwallgate, which rose steeply around and under the towering church. They set off, tired and weary, past squalid, dismal cottages whose inhabitants filled the narrow side streets with their cries. Their hearts sank as they glanced down dark alleyways and saw noisy taverns and slime-filled gutters.

At last they reached the top and halted, breathing deeply after the climb. They stood and they stared. They stood at the high iron gates of St Michael and All Angels and looked across at the Swan, a white-washed, three-storey inn, which took up almost half of one side of the square. ‘Is that ours, Douglas? Really ours?’ she’d whispered, holding tightly on to his hand as if she’d been afraid of falling. Between the inn and the shops an arched entrance led to stables and coach yards and the inn’s oak-framed windows and dark timbering stood out clearly, even on a half-lit night such as last December’s. The colourful sign above double oak doors was attractive but unnecessary since ‘The Swan Inn’ was painted in large black letters between the first and second storeys.

Now Douglas lifted the sash and felt the frosty air catch the back of his tight throat. He closed his eyes for a second, trying once more to shut out the image of Jeannie’s lifeless face, afraid that this picture would for ever be superimposed in his memory on the face he loved.

He thought back to early summer when she’d told him, blushing like a young maid, that their child was expected before the turn of the year. He remembered feeling pride swelling in his chest.

‘We’ll find a house,’ he told her as he hugged her to him. ‘The Swan’s respectable – a fine living but no a place to bring up children.’

His few months as owner had shown him that they could afford to rent one of the houses on the edge of town where the narrow, medieval streets broadened out into straight roads and, wandering randomly from these, the lanes and widely-spaced houses of the well-to-do where Patrick and Danny Kennedy were building houses.

‘I wouldn’t want my bairns to live near the rough end of town,’ Jeannie had said. ‘I don’t like to see children dirty and hungry, like the poor wee beggars down Churchwallgate and Churchwall Street. I’d love a house, Douggie. A big one, with a garden. Can we afford it?’

He remembered the excitement in her face as she’d added, echoing his own thoughts, ‘Patrick and Danny Kennedy are building houses on Lincoln Drive. There’s two’ll be ready come spring and we’ll have a big family, God willin’.’

Their house would be ready in early summer and only himself and the child to fill it. Now the baby’s plaintive cries were filling the dark space behind him. Would he be able to bring up their son alone? Should he send the wee one up to Scotland to be brought up by its aunts and uncles? No, he wanted to keep the child by him.

Douglas leaned out over the sill, feeling cold air sharp against his face, chilling the dampness under his eyes. The bells of St Michael’s were pealing out now, the joyful sound ringing out over the rooftops of the ancient mill town, over the apex of the town hall roof and over to the distant Pennine hills, whose higher slopes were already shining white, making them appear nearer, reminding Douglas of the Grampian mountains of home.

Churchwallgate and its network of smaller streets was well served with rough taverns and the sounds of drunken revelry reached Douglas’s ears; an ugly cacophony that even the bells could not drown. He pulled the window down at the sound, behind him, of Dr Walker entering the room.

‘I’m sorry, McGregor.’ The young doctor stood beside him. ‘We could have done nothing even if we’d been expecting it.’

‘Did she suffer?’ Douglas’s voice was strained. He swallowed hard to gain control, not wanting the doctor to see how deep his grief went or guess that once he was alone he would give himself over, in privacy, to the tears that were welling up in his throat.

‘No. She’d know nothing. She’d just feel tired. She lay back and closed her eyes. You saw the rest.’

Jeannie had sunk against the pillows and closed her eyes after Douglas had held her. It was a few minutes before the nurse noticed her pallor and the light, sighing breathing that told of the haemorrhage that would take her so quickly from them.

‘There’s a woman on Mill Street who lost her baby yesterday. Shall I ask her to nurse your son for you?’ the doctor asked.

‘If that’s the best thing. Do what ye have to.’ Douglas drew the curtains across the window and switched on the light. ‘I’ll keep the bairn with me here. I’ll no send him oot. Ask the woman to come here to feed him, will ye?’

‘I will. And I’ll ask Jack Cooper, the farmer, to come to see you. His wife delivers the country babies. She keeps a special cow and a goat for the ones whose mothers can’t feed them.’ Dr Walker put a hand on the big Scotsman’s shoulder in a gesture of friendship, paused for a moment and added, ‘He’s a fine boy. Strong and healthy.’

Douglas looked at the doctor and saw in his face a sadness that mirrored his own. The man had done his best to save Jeannie and he’d feel the death of a patient deeply. Douglas was not alone in his loss.

‘Thank ye,’ he said. ‘I’ll be a good father to him.’

It had been going on for six months and her need of him was growing. It was mid-February, midnight, and bitter cold outside. Inside the Temperance Hotel the windows were hoary with frost.

Carrie always waited until the house was asleep before she could go to his room on silent, slippered feet, downstairs to the room beneath her own, where he waited for her. Under the sheets she was naked. She would put her silk chemise on under her dressing-gown as soon as the house was still. He liked to have something to take off her, he said. It excited him.

She did not allow him to come to her. Nobody would think it odd that she, the owner of the hotel, should be the last to retire, she told him. But if she permitted him to come to her she would not have been able to refuse him. As it was, she could deny herself the sinful lusts of the flesh and wonder, on the chosen lonely nights, at her hypocrisy. For she was more than ever pious, at chapel, and she knew that she was as a whited sepulchre.

Since the very first time, she’d tried not to ask herself what Father would have said. For she was a different woman from the one her father had meant her to be. She was truly sinful now. She had come to delight in voluptuous feelings, finding that she was living in a state of heightened awareness, letting her imagination have control of her. All the things Father had warned her against.

Odours were stronger, colours were brighter, words and music could move her to tears. Even the bells, which before had seemed to be tolling her life away, now matched the strong heartbeat that always preceded Patrick’s arrival. She knew when he was approaching the house for her heart set up its thumping seconds before her ears caught the sound of his footfall outside in the street.

And she was softer, her clumsy stiffness gone, and she moved easily, gracefully, in time to the music in her head and the strong thud of her pulses. And it was all the things her father had warned her against.

At the start she felt that it was written on her face for all to see. Her hands shook when she handed him his letters. She avoided his eye, afraid that in front of other lodgers the leaping passion they aroused in one another with no more than a quick glance would give the lie to their formality of manner. Yet nobody had seen it.

Now she allowed him to take her to her bed, in her own room, on the two afternoons each week when Mrs Bettley and the bedroom girl weren’t there. Tonight she lay, waiting. There was no sound but that of her own heart hammering in her throat and her ears. She would go to him tonight and in the morning, at dawn, she would return to her cold bed in her scented room.

She looked at the shaft of moonlight, palely lighting the window, and remembered. Last night, after their loving, they had talked for a while. She had a habit of reliving it, remembering every word, every look, and dwelling on them when he wasn’t there.

They had been in his bed, until an hour before dawn when he’d lit the gas light above the bed and leaned, looking down at her. ‘Caroline Aurora,’ he said in the deep baritone voice that made her insides curl up. ‘What beautiful names.’ A great wide smile came across his face and he asked her, ‘Do you know who Aurora was?’

‘Is it something to do with Aberdeen?’

‘No. Aurora was the goddess of dawn.’