Liza Read online

  Liza

  Irene Carr

  Copyright © Irene Carr 2014

  The right of Irene Carr to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2003 by Hodder and Stoughton

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Extract from Katy’s Men by Irene Carr

  Prologue

  SUNDAY, 20 JANUARY 1907, NORTH SEA

  A bad black winter morning. Liza Thornton clung to the leather and steel solidity of the chair as the ship’s soaring and plunging tried to tear her loose. She was stronger than she looked, a slender, dark-eyed, dark-haired slip of a girl, soon to be twenty-one years old. The chair was of polished wood and leather and bolted to the deck, one of a dozen set around the table in the day-cabin set aside for the dozen passengers usually carried. The windows looked out on to a wild sea and Liza could smell the salt tang of it along with the leather. She had not bargained for this weather and feared for her life, but also for her future if she survived this crossing. She was facing humiliation and poverty.

  The ship was the SS Florence Grey, a tramp steamer out of Hamburg with a general cargo and passengers, making her nine knots and bound for the port of Sunderland at the mouth of the river Wear. Now she heaved up for the thousandth time as a huge wave passed under her, then smashed down into the trough on the other side. She seemed to shudder throughout her length and Liza swallowed nervously. She was no stranger to ships or travelling but had never experienced a storm like this at sea.

  The door of the saloon swung open, letting in a blast of cold air, and another girl entered. She was the only other passenger who had come aboard at Hamburg, crossing the gangway at the same time as Liza. The newcomer was also dark but taller by an inch or two and she was dressed in a tailored tweed coat with a fur collar and court shoes of fine leather. Liza, by contrast, wore a plain coat of blue serge reaching to her buttoned boots, which had been repaired several times. A plain felt hat perched on her piled hair while the taller girl sported an expensive-looking straw with an ostrich feather. She had been followed up the gangway by a porter carrying a costly leather suitcase and a voluminous travelling rug. At her order, ‘Put them in my cabin, please,’ he had dived below.

  She had one of the two first-class cabins amidships but below deck. Liza had one in steerage, right aft and close to the thunderous beat of the engines. She had slept poorly, beside a porthole washed by the pounding sea. When the storm blew up on the second night out she abandoned the cabin to doze uneasily in the saloon. From long familiarity Liza recognised this girl’s clipped accent and manner: she was used to money and servants. The girl had glanced at Liza, across the social gulf that divided them, had seen she was carrying a cheap cardboard case and ignored her.

  She did not ignore Liza now: ‘I’ll join you, if I may. I find the cabin stuffy and not very comfortable.’ She was pale and her full lips twitched. She slid into the chair next to Liza, who moved the cardboard case to make room for her.

  Your cabin’s a sight better than mine, Liza thought. Tell the truth: you’re too scared to stay down there on your own. But she could understand the girl’s fear: the cabin, like Liza’s, was below the waterline. She answered, ‘You’re welcome, Miss.’ Welcome for her company, a fear shared ... Liza’s accent was almost a copy of the other’s now because she had learned it as part of her job.

  ‘I’m Cecily Spencer,’ the girl introduced herself.

  ‘Liza Thornton.’

  Fragile smiles were exchanged. Cecily had brought with her a rug and now she shook it out and spread it over their knees. ‘This will keep us warm.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss.’

  They were both distracted by the storm and sat silent for some seconds, tense, as the ship bucked and soared again. Then the door was flung open and a seaman shouldered in, bulky in oilskins and sou’wester glistening with seawater. He grinned at them: ‘All right, ladies?’ They nodded, forced smiles, and he tried to reassure them: ‘There’s no cause to worry. This old gal has been through a lot worse than this.’

  They tried to look calm. ‘Bring my suitcase up, please. I won’t be going below again,’ Cecily asked, or rather ordered.

  ‘Aye, ma’am.’ He backed out, closing the door, but returned in a few minutes with it. ‘There y’ are, ma’am.’

  ‘Thank you. That will be all.’

  Thus dismissed, he left. Liza thought her case looked cheaper than ever beside the luxurious leather one, which was embossed with the initials CS. Her companion smiled. ‘I have some papers in there I would not like to lose, but nothing very valuable. It’s really just an overnight bag. My main luggage is following.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Liza replied. Everything she owned was in her cardboard case and nothing very valuable, either. She had only a few coins left in her thin purse after paying for her passage.

  As if to prove the seaman wrong, the ship rolled. She tilted to starboard as if she was going to capsize, and everything loose in the saloon was tossed across the deck. The two cases slid down until halted by the side of the cabin. Cecily squeaked and seized Liza: She’s turning over!’

  ‘No, she isn’t!’ Liza’s reply was more prayer than denial. She held on to her chair as Cecily’s fingers dug into her arm and slowly, terribly slowly, the Florence Grey heaved herself back on to an even keel.

  ‘Silly of me. Of course she’s all right. I’m sorry.’ Cecily spoke quickly, betraying the need to speak, to say something, anything, to blot out the storm. ‘Still, I’ll be glad to step ashore and set my feet on terra firma.’ Liza knew that tag, had learned it from an employer. But Cecily was running on: ‘I didn’t want to come in the first place. I’ve always kept away from the north, but I’ll be twenty-one soon and I have to see the lawyers in Sunderland about my inheritance. I was orphaned when I was sixteen and my father’s estate is held in trust for me. I inherit on my birthday, four weeks from today. I had a guardian, my uncle, but he has just died — Edward Spencer, the shipowner. I expect you’ve heard of him.’

  ‘No,’ Liza replied baldly, wishing Cecily would be quiet. She did not want to talk, just to sit braced against this mad sea. So they shared the same birthday? Liza had nothing to celebrate.

  ‘I’m surprised. He’s well known in Sunderland.’

  ‘I’ve never been there in my life.’ Liza explained: ‘I was born and grew up in Newcastle but I couldn’t get a passage to the Tyne. I found this ship could take me to Sunderland and I can catch a train from there.’ Besides, the Florence Grey was cheap and Liza could not afford to wait in lodgings for a ship that would take her to Newcastle. But now she thought that this young woman might possibly be an answer to some of her problems. She asked respectfully, ‘Will you be needing staff, Miss?’

  Cecily shook her head abstractedly, her eyes wide as the ship pitched. ‘No. I expect there will be staff at my uncle’s house.’ She added, ‘I thought you might be in service.’

  ‘Yes.’ Liza was not surprised by the deduction. A young woman who was unescorted and obviously without money was likely to be in service. ‘I’m a lady’s maid,’ she added proudly. That meant she was the cream of household staff.
She did not open doors, dust furniture or sweep carpets on her hands and knees. She had done all that, but had graduated by hard work. A lady’s maid looked after her mistress, dressing and undressing her, laundering and ironing, doing everything to make smooth her employer’s days.

  Cecily thought that accounted for her accent, very like Cecily’s save for a suggestion of North Country. ‘Are you going home for a holiday or seeking a new position?’

  ‘I’m looking for another place. I resigned from my last one to better myself.’ That was not true but Liza could not say she had been dismissed — unfairly, but still dismissed — in allegedly shameful circumstances. Her cheeks heated.

  Cecily did not notice this, more interested in her own affairs and the storm. ‘Do you think the weather is ameliorating?’

  The ship did seem to be riding more easily. ‘It’s blowing over,’ Liza agreed.

  Cecily sighed and seemed to relax a little. ‘I hope I don’t have to stay too long in Sunderland. It’s an awful place, and I’ll be out of it as soon as I can. There’s a young man, my fiancé, waiting for me in London.’ And that was only partly true: he was her lover, and her late guardian had known nothing of him. ‘We’re to be married soon.’

  ‘Yes?’ Liza was also relaxed now — and tired. She guessed that Cecily had slept in the comfort of her first-class cabin before the storm broke. But she was interested: she had once been close to marriage, and there had been another time when she thought she was, but that sadness and shame was in the past. ‘Are all the arrangements made?’

  * * *

  In fact Cecily had not slept well, had found the little cabin cramped and claustrophobic. She yawned, a hand over her mouth. ‘It will be at St George’s in Hanover Square ...’ She let her imagination run on. She was feeling more at ease and enjoying her storytelling. The servant girl seemed impressed, too. There’s no harm in it, Cecily thought, and we’ll probably never meet again. From talking of her imagined wedding she harked back to her time at her Swiss finishing school and the discipline imposed there.

  She stopped when she saw that Liza’s eyes were closed and thought, nettled, The girl is asleep! But then she found herself yawning again. She settled drowsily into the chair and tucked the rug around her. In minutes she, too, was sleeping. Both girls were tired and now lulled by the slow lift and descent of the ship as she rode the long swell.

  * * *

  An hour later they were roused by the sailor shoving the door open. When he saw them waking and blinking he apologised: ‘Sorry, ladies, I didn’t know you were having a nap. I just looked in to tell you we’ve reduced speed to dead slow on account of the fog.’

  They peered out of the salt-encrusted windows of the saloon and saw the mist writhing greyly. From above them the ship’s siren blared a long, mournful note. There was a smell of coal smoke and Cecily said, anxious again, ‘Something’s burning!’

  ‘Don’t you worry, Miss. That’s only the smoke from our funnel. Now we’re going so slow we’re not leaving it astern and it’s hanging about us.’ The door slammed behind him as he left.

  ‘I was telling you about my finishing school when you fell asleep,’ Cecily said.

  Liza caught the note of reproof. ‘Yes, Miss, I’m sorry.’ She could only recall vaguely the details of the planned wedding and did not want to hear about the school, but she was polite because she still hoped she might find work through this girl.

  It seemed Cecily had tired of talking about school. ‘That’s all over now, though. When I’m twenty-one I will be able to do as I like, spend my money as I please. I just have to put up with other people’s arranging things for the next four weeks, because my guardian’s solicitors made the travel arrangements. Left to myself, I would have spent the time in London and gone north when I was due to inherit ...’ Her voice trailed away and she stared at Liza with one finger to her lips. Then she smiled. ‘But you are looking for a position.’

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ Liza said, puzzled.

  ‘You could work for me for four weeks.’ Liza was bewildered. ‘You could be me! Nobody knows me in Sunderland. If you take my place I can go to London.’

  Liza was vaguely aware of distant sirens wailing as, stunned, she took in this preposterous suggestion. ‘I can’t,’ she said.

  ‘Of course, you can.’ Cecily fumbled excitedly in her handbag and found her purse. ‘I’ll pay you five pounds.’

  Five pounds! That was nearly three months’ pay! Liza swallowed. ‘I — can’t. They’d find me out.’

  ‘No, they won’t! How can they? I told you, they’ve never seen me. Uncle Edward hasn’t even a photograph, except the one of my class, taken when I first went to school in Switzerland. I was seventeen and among another dozen girls. It could be anyone.’ She hurried on: ‘Look!’ She held out her palm on which lay five golden sovereigns. ‘Just for four weeks. Then, when I am due to inherit, I will come north and say, "Here I am!" I’ll give you another five pounds and off you go to Newcastle.’

  Liza was dumb. She stared at temptation in the shape of the sovereigns but common sense told her this was a mad idea. She shook her head regretfully: five pounds — no, ten — would buy her a breathing space in which to put her life together. The siren moaned again. She averted her gaze from the coins in Cecily’s palm and turned to the window.

  She saw the black mass materialise out of the grey, formless at first, then swiftly hardening into a ship with her bow pointed at the Florence Grey. Liza watched it charge towards her, looming larger with every second. There was a running figure on the deck of the other vessel, his arms waving, and she could make out men on the bridge now. She heard Cecily shriek, ‘She’s going to hit us!’ And seconds later the sharp bow smashed into the Florence Grey amidships on the starboard side.

  She heeled over from the force of the blow and her engines stopped as her assailant ground along her side with a screeching and clanging of tortured metal. The ships parted then and that lethal bow, crumpled now, was turning away, then slid off into the fog, lost to sight. The siren of the Florence Grey blared continuously, the signal for a vessel in distress. It sounded like the wail of an animal mortally wounded.

  ‘Captain says to take to the boats! You ladies come along o’ me!’ the sailor shouted from the door.

  ‘Take my suitcase, please!’ Cecily called. She rolled the rug into a ball and tucked it under her arm. The sailor muttered under his breath but obeyed — and took Liza’s as well.

  ‘Thank you,’ Liza said.

  ‘That’s all right, Miss, but hurry. I don’t reckon she’s got long.’ As he spoke the ship lurched, listing to starboard.

  The girls followed him to a boat on the port side. The men there had already undone the lashings and taken off the cover. They helped Liza and Cecily into the boat and tossed in their cases after them. Liza’s fell on one corner and burst open. She grabbed it and plumped down beside Cecily as the boat was lowered, with one sailor forward and another aft, manning the falls and ready to cast off. Because of the list it bumped and grated against the ship’s side as it descended towards the dark sea. But then the man aft yelled a warning, the ship lurched again and Liza and her case were thrown out into the sea.

  She fell between boat and ship, looked up to see the steel wall of the Florence Grey and the boat surging in to crush her between the two. The sea closed over her head and she knew she was about to die. Oh, Mother! she thought in despair.

  1

  17 FEBRUARY 1886, NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE

  Twenty years before the Florence Grey sailed from Hamburg, Kitty Thornton fought for the life of her child.

  ‘This could be the death of her,’ said Aggie, sixty and bulky in a rusty black dress that brushed the floor. ‘It was always you or her folks sent for when there was a confinement or somebody to be laid out. Now it looks like Kitty’s turn. She’s far ower auld to hev a bairn, poor lass. And premature!’ The whisper carried — just — to the other woman stooping over the bed.

  Jinnie was of an age but
taller, skinny as a rake. She replied, low-voiced, ‘We cannae dae owt aboot it noo, Aggie.’

  Both women were Kitty’s neighbours, come in response to this emergency. Their words did not register with Kitty, who lay on the wrinkled sheet and cried out shrilly and weakly, in agony. Outside the wind moaned and rattled the windows, old, warped and loose in their frames. Rain hammered on the streaming panes. At one in the morning, the streets outside were empty, the cobbles glistening wetly in the darkness, each one a little island.

  Aggie whispered again, ‘And falling off a chair, Jinnie! What was she daeing, standing on a chair?’

  Jinnie sighed. ‘She’s been taking in washing since she had to give up as barmaid. She was standing on the chair to hang it up in the kitchen.’ They were in the small bedroom, the bed taking up most of the space, its side clapped against one wall, its head against another. There was a straight-backed chair, an old chest of drawers and an aspidistra on a spindle-legged table. A print of a sailing ship was the only picture. The grate in the fireplace was black and empty. There had not been a fire in it for years, even in the winter’s cold, because of the cost of coal.

  ‘And her man?’ Aggie enquired. ‘That Andrew should be here, but where is he?’ ‘The last letter she had off him, he was in America and bound for China.’ Jinnie pulled a handkerchief from a pocket of her pinny and mopped the brow of the woman on the bed. ‘There now, Kitty, there now, bonny lass.’

  ‘He’s all reet, had his fun and buggered off out of it,’ Aggie whispered.

  ‘Never mind Andrew, though I saw him just afore he sailed and he’d heard there was a babby on the way. He was in a rare worry. But where’s that bloody doctor?’

  As she spoke he was climbing down from his trap with its flickering lamps. He left his pony standing in the rain and tramped along the passage, his boots echoing hollowly on the boards. In the kitchen, the other ground-floor room rented by Kitty, he nodded at the other three women, more neighbours, sitting around the fire. A line was stretched across the room, just below the ceiling, festooned with damp washing. Kitty had hung up some of it before she fell and the neighbours had completed the job. The doctor ducked his head to pass under it and went on into the bedroom. Someone whispered, ‘He’s in a bad temper.’