Minerva Lane

by Judith Glover

Genres: Sagas

Synopsis

Minerva Lane is buzzing with gossip. Widow Lizzie Gallimore has married her handsome lodger Jack McShane. And Lizzie's daughter Ruby is delighted to have a father figure in her life, even though her affection for him upsters her childhood sweetheart, and her brother Joe. Then a traumatic event reveals Jack in his true colours. Determined to save her family from corruption and humiliation, Ruby seeks independence. She suffers the harsh realities of a working life as she tries to protect her brother while denying herself the comfort from the one man who truly cares for her. Until, eventually, the truth emerges... Minerva Lane is both a powerful love story and a vivid evocation of working-class life in the Black Country during the Victorian era, written by Judith Glover, author of The Stallion Man.

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

The boy lay shuddering in his unconscious state, his pale, pinched face only inches from the boots of the children gathered round him. They stood looking on in fascinated silence until he was quiet at last, and then with the indifference of the very young they left him lying in the grass and went back to playing their interrupted game.

Only one little girl stayed behind, her thumb in her mouth. After a while she crouched beside the boy and started poking at him with a stick; and when he still didn’t move she got to her feet and trotted off along the path to an arch leading into a cobblestoned yard stacked with barrels.

From an open door at the other side of the yard sounds of laughter and loud drunken voices spilled into the April evening. Earlier today Lizzie Gallimore had married her lodger, Jack McShane, and many of their neighbours from the closely-knit community of Minerva Lane had packed into the saloon bar of the Harp to help the couple celebrate their wedding.

While the small child stood uncertainly, an older girl came out through the door, glancing back over her shoulder with a smile for someone behind.

The child recognised her. Taking the thumb from her mouth she piped up, “Ruby – oh, Ruby come quick, your Joe’s fell down and he wo’ shift!”

The smile vanished from Ruby Gallimore’s young, pretty face. “Where is he, Pru?” she asked, instantly anxious.

The little girl turned and pointed.

Taking her by the hand, Ruby hurried with her through the archway back into the garden where the children were running about at their game of tag. Her brother Joe was still where he’d fallen, lying with an arm thrown up to cover his face, his legs pathetically spindly in their polished, too-big boots.

She flung herself on her knees to examine him, her tawny-coloured hair spilling forward in heavy, loose waves. A young man who had followed her out of the yard came and knelt at the boy’s other side.

“What’s happened here?” he asked her, concerned. “Another of his turns?”

Ruby thrust the hair from her face. “Aye, looks like it, but I think he’ll be all right. He hasn’t hurt himself.” She raised her brother’s head, supporting it gently against the small, soft curve of her breast.

“Here, let me take him –” Matthew Dyson eased Joe from her and got up, cradling the limp body in his arms. “He ought to be in bed, it’ll be better than here wi’ all this racket. The excitement’s probably been too much for him, what wi’ the wedding and everything.”

She nodded. Then, jumping to her feet she said, “I’d best run inside and tell our Mother first. You go on wi’ him, Matt, and I’ll follow as quick as I can.”

Catching up the long skirt of her green plaid dress, the fifteen-year-old girl darted back into the yard and through the door, to the crowded saloon at the far end of the passage. A setting sun pierced the haze of pipe smoke in the room with shafts of ruddy light that dulled the sallow flare of the gas jets and silhouetted the bonneted heads of the wedding party sitting at a table in the window.

Ruby elbowed her way over. Her mother Lizzie was leaning against the burly shoulder of her bridegroom Jack McShane, both of them flushed with the amount of drink they’d had in celebration. Lizzie’s face wore a happily stupid expression, and when Ruby managed to push through to the table she gave the girl an unfocused squint before greeting her with a smile that for a moment lent her fading prettiness something of its former beauty.

“Hallo, here’s Ruby! Come to sit wi’ your Mam, have you?” she cried, patting the bench. “Come to gi’ your new Dad a kiss?”

“Mam, I can’t stop,” Ruby said urgently. “I’m just off home wi’ our Joe – he’s been took poorly.”

“Eh? Eh, what you say?”

She repeated herself louder.

“Our Joe’s took poorly?” Lizzie struggled to collect her fuddled wits. “Oh, he hasn’t had one of his faints, has he, Ruby?”

“Now there’s no need to worry yourself, Mam. Matthew and me will look after him.”

“I’d best come on home.” Clutching Jack McShane’s arm, Lizzie tried to get up.

“Let the lad be,” said Jack, pulling her down again.

“But you heard our Ruby –”

“Let him be, Lizzie! It’s your wedding day an’ you ain’t finished enjoying it yet.” Her bridegroom grappled her affectionately, showing the burst seam of his jacket armhole. He was a big man, a furniture remover by trade, with coarsely handsome features dashingly set off by a black moustache and side-whiskers. “Ruby’s a capable wench. Her’ll take care o’ Joe, so stop your fretting.”

He winked at his new stepdaughter, and she gave him a brilliant smile in return before pushing her way out again to the door.

Leaving the Harp, Ruby ran down Walsall Street in pursuit of Matthew Dyson and managed to catch up with him and Joe before they reached Minerva Lane. By now the sun had disappeared behind the roofs of tenements and factories and a grape-coloured April dusk was beginning to thicken in the narrow streets.

Minerva Lane lay in one of the poorest areas of Wolverhampton. Bordered on one side by the canal and the railway, and on the other by the Bridge Iron Foundry and the brickworks, it contained a row of shabby terraced cottages at its bottom end which housed a dozen or so families including the Gallimores and the Dysons. Not far away, occupying what had formerly been the municipal workhouse, was Chubb’s Lock Manufactory where eighteen-year-old Matthew worked as an apprentice.

He and Ruby Gallimore had been close friends from childhood, attending the same Board School in Walsall Street where young Joe was now a pupil. They had made no secret of their strong attachment and the bond of loyalty they shared. Since turning thirteen Ruby had been employed in domestic service, and in that time there’d been other apprentices and errand boys wanting to walk out with her, but she’d never said yes to any of them – though she teased them a good deal for their boldness.

It was the same tale with Matthew: for him, no other girl in the world could so much as hold a candle to his sweetheart. Being a well set-up, nice-looking young fellow, Matt was just the type to catch the female eye, nor did he drink (his people were strongly Chapel) which favoured him even further, since a man who didn’t squander his wages on beer was better capable of providing for a wife and family. Several young women at his workplace had already shown a forward interest in him, but he’d given his heart to the tawny-haired, green-eyed girl from Minerva Lane.

“I’ll put the kettle on the hob for a pot of tea for us,” Ruby said, pushing open the yard door so that Matthew could carry Joe inside. The boy had started regaining consciousness during the walk back from the Harp and was now in that lethargic, mumbling, drowsy state which always followed a seizure.

After Jack McShane had come to rent the Gallimores’ back bedroom six months earlier, Joe’s little bed had been brought downstairs to a corner of the kitchen out of the way beside the wooden dresser.

“There, young ’un, now just you settle yourself down for a good nap,” Matthew told him, removing the boy’s boots and covering him over with the blanket, “and when you wake you’ll be feeling right as a trivet again.”

Joe murmured something, but his mauve-tinged lids were already fluttering. In another few minutes his breathing had quietened, becoming slow and regular as he fell into a healthy sleep.

Matthew sat at the end of the bed watching Ruby move about the kitchen putting a match to the fire in the black-leaded range, and lighting the single gasolier. This was a much poorer home than his own at the opposite end of the row, the difference showing in its furnishings, not in its standard of cleanliness, for Mrs Gallimore kept the place scrubbed and spotless with her daughter’s help. But she’d been a widow these past three years – her husband died in 1882 – and the money she earned serving beer at the Harp was only enough to provide the bare essentials. In Matthew’s house the floors were covered with squares of drugget carpet, but the Gallimores had only pegged-rag mats to hide the wooden boards; and at the kitchen window where Agnes Dyson had curtains, Lizzie Gallimore could only afford a piece of ecru netting on a cane.

“It’s going to make a lot of difference round the place now your Mam’s got a man’s wage coming in again,” he remarked. “More of a difference than what she’s been able to make letting lodgings. Mr McShane’s got a good steady job working for that Fred Ingram, the sort of job that pays well an’ all.”

“Aye, I’m hoping there’s better times ahead for us now.” Ruby gave him a smile as she went to the dresser for something. “Our Mother’s happy at any rate, and that’s the main thing. I can’t tell you the change it’s made in her, having a man round the house to show her a bit of attention. She missed our Dad …”

“I know. I could, see it in her face.” Matthew glanced again at young Joe, then got to his feet. “Still, she did her best for him, Ruby. If the doctor with all his skill couldn’t save your Dad, I don’t know what more your mother could have done.”

There was silence while they each remembered Charlie Gallimore, one of the cheeriest, most happy-go-lucky of souls, reduced at the end to a wheezing, weakly man aged before his time. The death of this father whom she had so adored and respected had broken the daisy-chain of Ruby’s settled, sunny childhood and left a hole in her emotions which was still not repaired.

“God bless him,” she said after a moment, “he was a good Dad to me and Joe. And he wouldn’t have wanted our Mam living the rest of her life wi’out any husband to look after her. He was never that sort.”

“D’you know what I was thinking just now?” Matthew came over to the range where Ruby was stooped down fanning the sticks of kindling into crackling flame. “I was thinking to myself how contented I shall be when you and me have a little place all of our own.”

He caught her to him as she straightened, and wrapping his arms round her slender waist went on, “And I can sit down of an evening after work and watch you while you get my supper ready, and maybe read to you from the newspaper. And after supper, in the summertime I’ll take you for a stroll down Horseley Fields to show you off, and when winter comes I’ll keep you snug by the fire.” He pressed his cheek against hers. “Could you fancy that, d’you reckon?”

“Mm, reckon I could. There’s one thing you’ve forgot, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Before you get me cooking your supper you’ll have to wed me first, Matt Dyson.”

Laughing, he picked her up and swung her round in a circle. Both of them knew it would be years yet before they could think seriously about marriage – but there was nothing wrong with dreams. Matthew would have completed his apprenticeship at Chubb’s manufactory in four years’ time when he was twenty-two, and then his wages would increase to something like thirty shillings a week and he could start putting a bit by regularly in savings. He wanted the best start to their life together. A better area than Minerva Lane, somewhere where their children could grow up away from the filth of canal and railway, the dirtladen fumes of the factories, and the pestilential stench from the abattoir next to the cattle market. Somewhere clean and healthy and wholesome.

He set Ruby back on her feet and kissed her freckled nose. “Oh, I’ll wed you, Ruby Gallimore, never you fear!”

Ruby could hear the singing long before the wedding party reached Minerva Lane. After Matthew had gone she’d prepared a bite of supper for herself and Joe; and later, having settled her brother back into bed for the night, she had sat by the fire to pass the time with some mending, engrossed in her thoughts.

The raucous chorus of voices coming along Walsall Street wakened her from a doze. She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was gone half past ten. Yawning, the girl got up and stretched herself, and went out to the scullery sink to fill the kettle from the pump, hearing the voices turn into the lane and the shouts of goodnight as one by one the little group dispersed along the row. Just as well it was Saturday night – there’d be sore heads in the morning by the sound of things, she thought.

The gate into the backyard clicked. There was a clumsy scrape of boots and some shushing and giggling, and then the door opened and Jack McShane stumbled across the threshold with the new Mrs McShane in his arms. Of the pair of them Lizzie, surprisingly, seemed in much the more sober condition.

“How’s our Joe been?” she asked at once, still clinging to Jack’s neck as he struggled to shove the door shut. “He’s been all right, has he, Ruby?”

“Oh, aye. He’s asleep again now. I gave him some bread and dripping for his supper and he wolfed the lot.”

“There – wha’ did I tell you,” said Jack, loosing Lizzie so clumsily she half fell to the floor. “If there’d been anything ailing the lad Ruby would ha’ come down the Harp an’ said so.” He lurched into the kitchen, collapsing in the armchair by the fire. “Dain’t I say t’ you t’ stop your mithering on …”

The kettle began singing on the hob and he paused to study it with the elaborate absorption of the very drunk before letting out a sudden happy laugh. “Eh, but we’ve made a right good night of it, ain’t we, Liz. I wo’ want t’ get married again in any great hurry.”

“You wo’ be getting married again at all, if I know about it!” Lizzie went over to look at young Joe, sound asleep on his bed in the corner. Bending to brush the thick fringe of hair from his forehead, she said more softly, “We’ll shift this bed upstairs tomorrow. He’ll have to share the back room wi’ you now, our Ruby, and me and Jack use the double bed in the front.”

During the months Jack McShane had been their lodger it was Ruby who’d always slept with her mother up there in the front bedroom. When the new arrangements were discussed some weeks ago, the girl had baulked at the fact that once they were wed the cosy warmth of her mother’s body in the big brass bedstead was going to be shared and enjoyed by the man who – one way and another – had taken her father’s place as well as her own.

Ruby knew what went on in the marriage bed: there was little excuse for ignorance in a district as poor as Horseley Fields where overcrowded conditions bred a lack of privacy which taught children from an early age to accept the facts of life as natural. Somehow, though, she found it difficult to think of her mother and Mr McShane behaving together like that. It seemed … shameful to expose their nakedness to one another and do the things that married couples did. Yet it wouldn’t be shameful when she and Matt Dyson were married and did it, so where lay the difference?

She thrust the image from her mind, unwilling to dwell on it. “O’ course I won’t mind sharing the back room wi’ Joe,” she said lightly, using her apron to lift the steaming kettle from the hob. “I’ve always liked that bedroom better any way. It’s got a view of the cut and the horses towing the boats.”

Her mother sat down at the table and eased off her new elastic-sided boots, blowing out her cheeks with the relief of getting out of them at last. “Make haste wi’ that pot o’ tea, our Ruby, I’m parched!”

“Aye, you can pour us a cup as well,” announced Jack, sitting forward. “I’d best not sup any more ale tonight or I wo’ be up t’ giving your mother what her’s married me for.”

“Jack –!” Lizzie shot him a coyly scandalised look. Untying the ribbons of her wedding bonnet, she put the hat aside and went over in her stockinged feet to perch herself on his knee. “You’re not to say such things in front of our Ruby. She’ll wonder what you mean.”

“Her knows what I mean – don’t you, sweetheart?” Jack glanced past her to his stepdaughter, and winked.

Ruby felt herself redden. Instead of answering she made a play of busying herself with the teacups at the table, keeping her back to him.

“Now that’s made you blush, eh?” he said, pleased with himself. “Don’t be bashful, Ruby – gi’s a look at your face an’ let’s see if I’ve coloured your cheeks for you.”

“Leave her be, you’re teasing the poor little wench,” Lizzie scolded him affectionately, pulling at his side-whiskers. “You know how her hates it.”

“Her don’t hate it, do you? Her loves a bit o’ teasing from her father.” Coming from Bilston, he pronounced the word “feyther” in his broad Black Country way of speaking.

“You’re not my father,” Ruby retorted, sufficiently stung now to turn on him suddenly, setting her hands on her hips. “And I’m not ever going to call you father, either. You’ll be Jack to me, just like you’ve always been.”

“That’s the spirit!” He grinned back at her, baring his strong teeth under the black moustache. “I like t’ see you when your sparks are flying. Any road … I’m too damn young t’ be your father.”

“You’re thirty-one,” reminded Lizzie.

“An’ Ruby’s fifteen. I can count.” Jack pulled his wife against him and kissed her noisily on the mouth. The fact that he was Lizzie’s junior by several years was the cause of a lot of light-hearted banter between the pair of them.

Ruby brought them their tea and left them to get on with it. Usually Jack’s teasing never bothered her, and she gave back as good as she got; but that he should refer to himself as her father, even in fun, had flicked her on the raw. He was her mother’s husband, and she respected him – admired him in many ways, even thought him handsome; but it was as her mother’s husband that she liked him, not as a surrogate father.

The difference mattered very much. And though none of them realised it that first night of Lizzie Gallimore’s marriage, in time to come it was to matter considerably more.

Over the next few months life at number 11 Minerva Lane gradually adjusted to its new domestic pattern.

In the late spring of that year, 1885, Ruby left her employment as a scullery maid and went to work as under-housemaid to a family in St John’s Square for an extra shilling a week. St John’s Square was a much better address than her previous place. Though hardly a mile from Horseley Fields, it lay on the other side of Snow Hill and therefore across the social boundary dividing middle-class Wolverhampton from the industrial slums. At the centre of the Square the worthy dignity of its Georgian church set the tone for the respectability of the neighbourhood, a respectability endorsed by the family names of those interred in its high-walled graveyard and the polished brass door-plates on the house frontages bearing the titles of doctors, solicitors, actuaries, and their kind.

Ruby’s new employer, Mr Surtees, was chief clerk at the London Provincial Bank in the town. He had three unmarried daughters still at home, very fashionable and popular young ladies who, being much in demand socially, cost him a pretty penny in dressmakers’ bills. Every so often the Misses Surtees’ unwanted cast-offs were disposed of to the housemaids, as was the practice, so that Ruby’s meagre wardrobe (and her mother’s) in time acquired several handsome outfits hardly more than a few years out of style.

The girl was happy in her new employment. She liked the family, not least for its benevolence, and was shortly on the best of terms with the other domestic staff. Her happiness was somewhat overshadowed, though, by a shift in the relationships at home.

At first she’d paid no attention when her stepfather began belittling Matthew Dyson, passing it off as just teasing. Whenever Matt called of an evening, for instance, the comment would be, “What, you here again, young shaver? Ain’t you got no home to go to?” or if Ruby spoke of Matt affectionately, repeating something clever he had said, Jack McShane would scoff at it and make the lad sound foolish.

After a time she’d found these remarks were starting to grate on her nerves and mentioned the fact to her mother; but Lizzie, like Matthew himself, laughed at her for taking them too seriously. Couldn’t she tell it was only Jack’s ham-fisted humour? All the same, as the days went by towards summer Ruby noticed Matt was coming to their house less often now, as if he wanted to avoid her stepfather, and this provoked her finally to anger.

“Why do you have to snape him every time you open your mouth?” she demanded of Jack. “He’s done nothing to you.” And when Jack had responded by shrugging off her quarrel as a joke, she’d persisted – “Don’t you like him, is that it?”

“Come on, I’ve got nothing against him. If the lad don’t want to call round here when he knows I’m home, it ain’t no skin off my nose.”

“But you make him look stupid!”

“Because I pull his leg a bit? What is he, a bloomin’ great babby or some’at that has to be coddled?”

For several weeks after, there was a notable coolness on Ruby’s side. She answered her stepfather if he spoke to her, but that was all. The ready smile disappeared, replaced by a frosty politeness; and in the evenings, instead of keeping him company till Lizzie came in from work around half past ten, the girl made a point of being with her friends, or else going to bed.

“I don’t know … things seem different now he’s married to our Mother,” she complained to Matthew. “The house doesn’t feel the same any more with him carrying on the way he’s doing.”

The two of them were out for a Sunday stroll along the towpath beside the canal, a walk they often took together. The industrial racket of manufactories on the opposite bank was stilled today and the wharves deserted, the reflected sunlight off the water patterning the hulls of barges which lay wallowing sluggishly against their mooring-posts.

“Jack’s taken on a big responsibility,” Matthew reminded her out of fairness. “Most chaps start their marriages wi’ just a Missis, but he’s got you and young Joe to consider as well as your Mam, so maybe he needs a chance to get himself settled.”

“Maybe.” Ruby shrugged. “Any way, let’s forget him, eh. Let’s talk about some’at more interesting.” She linked her arm through her sweetheart’s, giving him one of her sudden radiant smiles. “D’you know what I was thinking when I woke this morning? I was thinking about the dress I’d like to be wearing when we get married. One o’ the daughters where I’m working now, Miss Amelia, she’s had this cream silk day-dress made for her, and ooh it’s beautiful, Matt – tiny little bows down the bodice, and the skirts all pleated frills. Cook told me the style was called a princess polonaise.”

“You’d knock a few eyes out in Minerva Lane in some’at like that!” Matthew laughed fondly.

“Wouldn’t I an’ all. If I’m still employed there in four or five years’ time I wonder if Miss Amelia might let me have it for our wedding?”

“Here, I’m not having you wed in anybody’s hand-me-downs,” he reproached her. “We’ll only be getting married the once, remember. I’d rather scrimp a bit myself to put the money by and get you a dress some’at like it, if that’s what you’ve set your heart on.”

Ruby pressed her cheek against his shoulder. “The only thing my heart’s properly set on is you, Matt Dyson – as if you didn’t know. It’s why I want so much to look my prettiest, so you’ll be proud o’ me.”

“If you was clad in rags, my chick, you’d still be the prettiest wench in the whole wide world as far as I’m concerned.” He responded with a kiss, tilting up her face beneath the brim of her flat straw hat. “I only wish we didn’t have so many years to wait before I can put that ring on your finger.”

“So do I.”

“It’ll be worth it, though.”

He kissed her again, hugging her to him before they walked on slowly, arm-in-arm together, blind to everything but one another.

When they came to the open fields beyond Lanesfield Basin they sat down on the bank by the bridge for a while to rest themselves, watching a solitary horse-drawn narrow-boat sliding out of the shadows of the dripping archway into the sunshine. Two little girls were playing with a litter of kittens on the roof of the gaily-painted cabin, and as the boat drifted smoothly past, one of them held up a kitten and made it wave its paw to Ruby and Matthew.

They waved back, smiling.

“I wonder where that’s bound for,” Matthew said, shading his eyes with his cap to watch them go. “Aldersley Junction, I expect, to join the Birmingham Canal. Or maybe a bit further on for the Shropshire Union.”

He looked round at Ruby. She had picked a bunch of the wild-growing willowherb known as ‘codlins and cream’ as they’d walked along, and was . . .