Mirabelle

by Judith Glover

Genres: Sagas

Synopsis

Mirabelle was born to sing. Illegitimate, unwanted, singing is her escape, in the workhouse, the factory, in service. All her spirit and all her dreams are in her pure, true voice. Singing for pennies outside taverns. As the demure, drawing-room plaything of a rich man. In the music-halls, first in the Midlands and then in London, singing brings her pleasure - and pain: men who want to cage her like a songbird, men who threaten, promise, demand. But always, through passion, tragedy and steadfast love, Mirabelle must sing.

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 336

Sample

In the cool of the April evening, as the sunset light was fading to a flush of crimson on the surface of the river, the gipsy gave birth to her baby beneath a bower of willows at the water’s edge.

It was a secluded place, hidden and well-sheltered. No one passed near. Only the wind in the leaves and the calling of birds and the rippling sigh of the Severn had kept her company through the long, hard hours of her labour.

Her name was Truffeni Smith. People regarded her as simple-minded because of the strangeness of her manner and expression, something fey about her, something lost and empty in her eyes. She was eighteen years old, of pure Welsh Romany blood, and her life had been spent in the tents of her people beneath the open sky of the Marches before she’d taken to the roads alone, wandering from town to town to beg a living, singing and dancing and playing her tambourine.

Freedom went hand in hand with hunger and cold, but she was used to that; and better to sleep empty under the stars than suffer being trapped by brick walls and locked doors. She hated confinement of any kind, and feared it, just as she hated and feared so many nameless things, those whispering grey shadow-shapes which spoke to her from the edges of her mind.

Then early last year – 1868 – she had met a man here in Bridgnorth and in the innocence of her other-worldly, childlike nature she had gone with him, for the first time tempted to break the laws of the Romany for love of a georgio.

He had been strong and big and swarthily handsome, and made her feel like a fragile bird in his hands; not frightened, but protected. Lying against the warmth of his body in the green arbour of the river willows, she had given herself to him, and for several months became his ‘little gipsy love’, his ‘black-haired beauty’. But when she found herself with child, suddenly he’d turned against her with harsh words and blows, no longer wanting her, thrusting her off to return to his wife and family; and with the bewilderment of an abandoned dog she’d crept back again to follow him, trailing after his footsteps through the streets and sleeping crouched against his doorway till his wife, finding her there, had set about her in a fury with tongue and fists and feet, driving her away.

For a while she had taken to the roads again, a pitiful figure, all spirit dying within her. Once her condition made it impossible any longer to dance, back she’d trudged through the slush of the late winter snows to Bridgnorth, and, starving now, been forced into the workhouse to endure the suffocating claustrophobia of a kairengro.

That was seven weeks ago.

Time passed.

This morning early, when the first pains came, the inbred instincts of her race had claimed her mind, impelling her to slip away unseen towards the river and seek out the place where her child had been conceived, between water, earth and sky.

It was born at sunset, a girl, a rakli chavi, tiny and black-haired.

Panting, the gipsy raised herself on an elbow and stared at it lying sleek with blood between her legs. The rose-gold light of dying day filtered through the willow leaves and glimmered on its puckered monkey-face; and for a moment the terrible emptiness of her own face was touched by an expression of infinite uncomprehending sadness. She still pined to the depths of her heart for her faithless georgio. She had given him her self, her very being, only to suffer rejection; and all she had left to offer him now in pledge of her love was this child, his own flesh born of her body, shared heart beating in shared life as a remembrance.

She did what she had to, cutting the cord with the knife from her pack; then washed the infant clean of blood in the shallows of the river and swaddled it tightly in her shawl. Afterwards, she lay down to rest, nursing her strength against the coming night, listening to the voices of the river calling to her above the distant, echoing chime of bells.

Long before dawn she stirred at last, and gathering her baby to her, took up her pack and crept from under the willows. A gauzy moon slipped in and out of the clouds, silvering her path as she made her way the mile or so towards the bridge and the sleeping streets of the town, passing like a shadow, silent on naked feet, hugging herself to the walls and flitting across the open cobbled slopes. Only once did she pause, in the market-place, to scavenge a wooden box from among the stalls; then on again through the darkness, slower now, her young strength draining from her with the birth-blood.

At length she reached a terrace of drab cottages built off one of the hilly, winding lanes, and at the third doorway stopped and looked about her. There was no sound except the gusting moan of the wind and the far-off bleat of sheep; no movement but the laboured panting of her own small breast.

Fearfully almost, she set down the box on the moon-whitened step and laid her baby within it, drawing her shawl about its wrinkled face, not daring to breathe any word for fear of rousing its muteness to a cry of hunger. For a moment more she stood, tears glinting on her pale cheek as her eyes searched the blinded windows where her georgio lay sleeping.

Then she turned and was gone again into the shadows, back to the river and the calling, siren voices of its waters.

The baby’s thin, protesting wail was taken at first for the noise of a cat, and ignored. It persisted however, sufficiently to aggravate the ill-tempered awakening of the occupants of the room above; and stumbling out of bed towards the window Jesse Lyon heaved up the sash with the intention of hurling a boot at the offending animal.

In the grey moth-light of a Sunday dawn the lane outside appeared completely deserted.

He leaned further out, craning his neck, thick-muscled shoulders jammed in the frame, his attention caught suddenly by something below against the front door.

“Wha’s matter now? Wha’s you looking at?” His wife’s voice, still slurred with sleep, came impatiently from behind.

He pulled his head in again to glance at her. “That inna a cat. There’s some’at been left down there on the step.”

The puzzled disbelief in his tone roused Kate Lyon enough to bring her struggling up amongst the bedclothes, red hair a tangled mess round her coarsely handsome features.

“You’re right, that inna no cat,” she said after a moment, suspiciously. “Hark to it – sounds more like some babby crying.”

With a sudden celerity which belied the stoutness of her size, she heaved her legs to the bare floorboards and went and pushed her husband aside to get at the window. “Here, let’s have a look for myself and see what’s a-going on!”

Catching the neck of her nightgown across her heavy breasts, she leaned out in turn. Directly below her she discerned an oblong box of the type used for crating oranges; and inside it, what appeared to be a bundle of rags, from which arose the hungry mewling wail of an infant.

Kate stared at it.

Slowly she levered herself upright again, and the narrowed expression in her eyes made Jesse glance awkwardly away, compressing his lips beneath the bushy black moustache. Then, angrily, looking back at her, he said, “Well? It inna nothing to do wi’ me whatever you’re thinking.”

“Inna it now. You expect me to believe that, Jesse Lyon?” Both of them spoke the native Shropshire dialect, in which the flattened vowels of the Midlands were lifted and rounded by a hint of Welsh intonation. “Best you go down and take a squint at that there parcel afore you start sounding so cocksure. Then mebbe you’ll recall to mind what trollop it is has been and left it there.”

“I dunna know what you’re talking about.”

His surly, evasive attitude as much as the irritatingly persistent squall of the baby had the effect of rousing Kate’s swift temper. She’d been well aware of her husband’s unfaithfulness last year with some flit-witted gipsy – it wasn’t the first time he’d strayed in the twelve years they’d been married – and she’d been aware, too, that the affair had led to pregnancy. As usual, no sooner had his fun been spoilt than home he’d come to Ebenezer Row to make his peace with Kate (if peace it could be called) and resume their hammer-and-tongs existence as though nothing had happened.

He hadn’t bargained with his gipsy woman though. Like a burr she had clung on fast to him and wouldn’t be shaken off, following him back from the iron foundry of a night and moaning and keening at the door – a situation which gave their neighbours in the Row considerable food for gossip and amusement. Kate hadn’t forgotten the humiliation.

“You dunna know what I’m talking about?” she echoed, setting her fists on her hips and thrusting her face aggressively into his. “You’ve forgot, have you, what it was you got up to wi’ that gipsy, that Truffeni whatsit? Or did I hear the story wrong? Eh? Was it somebody else was seen by the river wi’ his trousers round his ankles merrily hauling the strumpet’s skirts above her head?”

A rush of blood turned Jesse’s features purple. “I told you –”

“Aye, I know what you told me, all right! You told me a pack o’ lies, as I learnt soon as ever that hussy turned up wi’ her belly starting to swell. Well, now your chick’s come home to roost by the sound o’ things, Jesse Lyon. There’s some’at been left on our doorstep as belongs to you, and I’ll gi’ you a single guess what it is. So best you go down and get shot of it afore all the Row finds out.”

He stared at her for a moment; then with a coarse oath turned away and started dragging his nightshirt over his head, flinging it aside as he reached for his trousers from the bed-rail.

“Why’s it always me as has to carry the keg?” he said savagely, trying to bluster his way out of the situation, kicking aside a chair as he bent to find his boots. “How do I know yon blasted babby’s any o’ my getting? That gipsy could have gone wi’ dozens.”

He threw open the door and went out on to the stair-head landing, almost falling over a boy sitting on the top step.

“Shift out o’ the way!”

Aiming a cuff at his eldest son’s head, Jesse went past him down the stairs and into the kitchen. The daylight was stronger now, and the first rays of sun crept feebly in at the window from beyond the alley wall, pitilessly revealing the squalid mess in which the family existed. Greasy dishes from last night’s meal still lay on the table with a heel of stale bread, the range grate was choked with overflowing ashes, and everywhere was the clutter of untidiness and dirt resulting from domestic negligence.

Instead of going through the ‘front’ or parlour, he left the house by the back way and went round via the yard into the alley which ran the length of the terrace, past vegetable plots and dusty chicken runs fenced between the communal wash-house at one end and the pigsty at the other.

Reaching the entry to the lane, he poked out his head to glance up and down the Row. To his considerable annoyance two figures were at that moment emerging from the door of number nine, Susan Cresswell and her boy setting off for early service at the Wesley Chapel near St Leonard’s Steps.

Cursing Mrs Cresswell’s pious habits, Jesse deliberated whether to remain where he was, or step out into the lane and try diverting her attention from the box there on his doorstep. Its wretched occupant had now fallen quiet – dead with any luck, he thought grimly – and in the muted background murmur of the morning the clatter of their boot heels on the cobbles sounded unnaturally loud as mother and son approached.

He decided to stay out of sight and hope they’d walk on by; but he hoped in vain, for just as they were passing, young Tom Cresswell loosed his mother’s hand and came skipping over to investigate the box.

“Eh, Mam –” he sang out after a moment, excitedly, “Mam, look here! Look what I’ve found!”

“Come on, Tommy, never mind that, we’ll be late,” she urged, not stopping.

“But Mam, look – somebody’s left a babby!”

His voice disturbed the infant’s hunger-weakened stillness, and Jesse Lyon cursed aloud as he heard it hiccup into life again and emit a single reedy wail.

Susan Cresswell paused in her tracks and half-turned, startled, her eyes going from the box to the fastened door of the Lyons’ cottage. She seemed uncertain what to do; then as the wail repeated its piteous note, she came hurrying back across the lane to her son and knelt to look for herself inside the box.

Jesse decided there was nothing for it now but to brazen out the situation.

“I dunna know who’s been and left that damn’ thing behind,” he announced with unnecessary roughness, emerging from the entry. “I was just this minute about to start knocking on folk’s doors to ask if any of ’em’s lost a babby.” Too late he remembered that Susan Cresswell had buried an infant of her own only weeks ago. “You dinna hear nothing in the night, I suppose?”

She looked up at him, still on her knees, and a drawn expression hollowed the prettiness of her young-old features. She shook her head.

“Where’s it come from, Mam?”

“Hush, Tommy.” Reaching out a gloved hand she drew him close to her side; then, hesitantly and with just a hint of wariness, she said, “I believe I recognise this shawl though, Mr Lyon. Dunna it belong to that poor gipsy we had round here?” She indicated the fringed cloth in which the baby lay swaddled, the peacock blues and greens of its print browned with patches of blood, and smelling now none too sweet. “It’s an unusual pattern. I remember it.”

Her observation turned Jesse’s temper into blustering resentment that she should so perceptively have voiced his own worst suspicions.

Heatedly he said, “What’s she doing a-coming back here and bothering me, I’d like to know. Dinna I have enough of it last year? Her’s got no right to ditch her blasted leavings at my door!”

Susan Cresswell leaned forward and gently pushed away the shawl from the baby’s head. There had never been any secret of the fact that Jesse Lyon was knocking about with some young gipsy all last summer and had put her in the family way. In such a small and tightly-knit community as Ebenezer Row everyone knew everything there was to know about one another’s affairs.

“Poor little mite –” There was a sudden melting tenderness in her voice as she gazed at the puckered, newborn face, helpless in its feeble rage against the world. “What d’you mean to do wi’ it, Mr Lyon?”

“He inna keeping it, that’s for sure!” The answer came with emphatic vehemence from above, where Kate Lyon, elbows on sill, had leaned from the window to follow the scene beneath. “He’s taking it down the Union. It’s their responsibility, not ours.”

“The Union –? But it’ll die there, you know it will.”

“A good riddance an’ all.”

Everything in Susan’s compassionate nature rose in rebellion against this stony-heartedness. Like so many of her kind existing in conditions of wretched poverty, she regarded the Union or workhouse with a dread approaching real horror: the harshness of its system left no room for any genuine charitable benevolence, and to enter within its walls was to lose all hope, all sense of decency, all self-respect. It was too often the ante-room to a pauper’s grave, especially for those whom life had stripped defenceless, the chronically sick, old folk too infirm to care for themselves, and children – deserted, illegitimate, orphaned. Society’s unwanted detritus.

“Wouldn’t it be better, surely, to go and fetch a constable?” she pleaded, leaning back on her heels, her skirts in the grimy dust, looking up at Kate. “They’ll need to know what’s become o’ the mother. Poor girl, for all we know she might be in desperate need o’ help –”

“We dunna want no truck wi’ the police.” It was Jesse who responded to this, angrily cutting her short. Attract the attention of the law and it could lead to all manner of awkward questions being asked; questions he’d rather not answer.

“Mam, Mam, shall us keep the babby, eh, shall we, Mam?” chipped in young Tom, pulling at his mother’s shabby jacket. “It was us as found it, wan’t it?” He looked into her face with eager hopefulness. “It wunna be no trouble – it can sleep in the drawer like our Mary did.”

At this mention of her little daughter’s name the words froze on Susan’s lips and she had to turn her head for a moment in the privacy of pain before she could control herself. Of the three children she’d borne her dear husband before he was lost at sea off Nova Scotia, only Tommy now survived. Of the others, one had been a stillbirth, and one her adorable baby Mary, so cruelly taken from her by infantile fever only weeks ago.

“Damn’ this –” Jesse’s impatience reached its limit. “I’m not standing about here all blasted morning,” and he bent as though intending to pick up the box.

“You’re not taking it to the Union!” Susan put out a hand to stop him. “You canna do that to your own flesh and blood, Mr Lyon.”

“You mind your own business, you silly bitch,” Kate shouted down, ugly with anger at having her nose rubbed quite so baldly in the truth of her husband’s infidelity. “Why dunna you push off about your own affairs and stop interfering!”

Susan’s sense of disgust, fuelled by a mother’s spontaneous instinct to protect the small and helpless, got the better of any fear of the Lyons. Before she stopped to consider the consequences of her action, she’d reached inside the orange box and lifted out the tiny swaddled body, hushing its tremulous cries against her breast. All thought of going to chapel was now abandoned. God could be served in other ways than prayer and psalm-singing.

“For pity’s sake –” She got to her feet, the baby cradled to her, her thin, slight figure menaced by the brutish, half-naked muscularity of Jesse’s strength. “For pity’s sake, have you no heart at all, neither of you?”

She looked down at the gipsy-black fluff of hair, the tight-closed eyes, the little, opened bird-mouth that was nuzzling at her now in a frantic search for food; then, without another word, she held out a hand to young Tom and led him off back along the Row towards home.

It was all round Ebenezer Row within the hour that Jesse Lyon’s gipsy piece had abandoned her newborn bastard on his doorstep, and that Susan Cresswell had gone and taken it upon herself to meddle.

Having called to see the evidence with their own eyes, the general opinion of her neighbours was that she should have left well alone, let Jesse get on and clear up his own dirty mess; but there was sympathy, too, among the kinder hearts. Susan was regarded as a decent, honest, God-fearing young woman, and it was typical of her to do what she had, even though asking for trouble. What with working all hours to keep herself and her lad, taking in sewing to eke out her widow’s pittance since her merchant seaman husband had perished with his vessel – then losing a baby too – one would think she’d enough to concern her already without getting embroiled in the Lyons’ domestic trammels.

“You take that perishin’ babby in your house, and on your own head be it!” Kate had yelled after her down the Row. “It’s a foundling. It ought to be shoved inside the Union, d’you hear me!”

Susan’s sole intention had simply been to get the baby cleaned and properly clad, and given some boiled sugar-water to ease its hunger, before she went and reported its finding to a constable. She had not been prepared, however, for the strength of feeling which overwhelmed her when she discovered the tiny mite to be a girl, resurrecting the presence of her own beloved daughter; and to hold a baby once more in arms which had been aching with emptiness these last weeks served but to double the power of these emotions.

As she tended the infant, dressing her in Mary’s little cap and gown and wrapping her in Mary’s crocheted shawl, the desolation of her own child’s loss seemed somehow to recede, and once the neighbours had gone it seemed the most natural thing in the world that in place of the sugar-water, Susan should offer instead her own breast, in the hope she might still have sufficient milk to suckle the poor, wretched mite.

Young Tom, a bright-natured boy of six who attended the local National School, sat swinging his legs on a kitchen chair and watching all his mother did.

“Why dunna she have a name, Mam?” he wanted to know, having puzzled for some little while over her answer to an earlier question. Everything had a name, something to call it by. He was Tom. Tom Cresswell. His friends in the Row were Charlie and Albert and Ada. The four Lyon boys (who were not his friends) were Reuben, Victor, Joseph and Harry. The milkman’s horse had a name, so did Mrs Warder’s cat next door, and so did the canary in the cage at the corner shop.

“She dunna have a name because nobody’s give her one,” Susan answered abstractedly, rocking the sleeping baby in her arms. “Her own mam dinna leave a note nor anything to tell us.”

“Yes she did, she did, Mam! It’s writ on the side o’ the box, look.” Tom jumped down from his chair and ran into the scullery to fetch the orange crate which Susan had sent him back to retrieve from the Lyons’ step, for breaking up for kindling. Nothing ever got wasted when one lived cheek by jowl with poverty.

“Look – see?” He showed her something stamped in indigo dye on the wooden laths, the trade name of a foreign wholesale fruiterer. Slowly he read from one capital letter to the next, tracing each with a forefinger, laboriously spelling out loud, “M-I-R-A-B-E-L-L-E. That’s a name, inna it, Mam? What does it say?”

His mother looked at him, smiling at the boy’s eagerness, and proud of his sharp intelligence. “It says Mirabelle. But that inna the babby’s name, chick.”

“’Course it is. Mirabelle … That’s a nice name. I like that!”

He came over, tossing the brown lick of hair from his eyes, and leaned against his mother’s shoulder to study the baby with renewed curiosity.

“Do you ’spect her mam’ld let us keep her if we asked?”

“I dunna know.”

“Why did she leave her on Mr Lyon’s step? Why dinna she knock the door?”

“Mebbe they was all asleep and dinna hear.”

“Why hanna the babby’s dad come round to look for her?”

“The questions you come out with!” Susan gave him a little shove with her shoulder; then, glancing up at the clock on the chenille-fringed mantelpiece, she told him, “Look at the time – quarter to twelve already. We’d best make a start if we’re going.”

Trying not to disturb the baby, she got reluctantly out of her chair; but as she did so, she was struck by the sudden thought that being a Sunday dinnertime there might not be any constable on duty, so it would be a wasted journey setting out just yet.

The chance of this excuse to keep the infant with her another few hours gave Susan a pleasurable sense of reprieve. Resting her cheek against the tiny head she closed her eyes a moment, remembering Mary; then sat down again and said to Tom, “No, we’ll leave it and have us a bite to eat first, shall we, chick? There’ll be plenty o’ time this afternoon for traipsing round the town.”

In fact it had gone three o’clock before they were finally ready – the baby needed a change and a second feed, and then the sky towards Clee Hills had turned darkly threatening – but eventually Susan ran out of reasons for delaying their departure.

Having swilled her face and Tom’s, she’d stopped to dampen the fire in the black-leaded range when there came a sudden violent knock at the yard door. Thinking to herself that this must be yet another of her neighbours come for a look at the Lyons’ gipsy baby, she lifted the piece of ecru net at the window to glance outside – only to find with a prickle of alarm it was Jesse Lyon himself standing there.

“Tom –? Tom, run and open the back door for Mr Lyon, there’s a good lad, then take yourself off to play a bit.” It was evident what this visit concerned, and she didn’t want her young son hearing anything he shouldn’t.

Collarless and unshaven, her caller saw himself through into the kitchen, his eyes flicking over the sparsely-furnished cleanliness of the place before alighting on the baby she’d taken up into her arms. He seemed embarrassed, she noticed; embarrassed and somehow agitated.

“I see you’ve still got it here, then,” he began awkwardly, shifting his gaze elsewhere.

“I was just this minute on my way out wi’ her as it happens,” Susan replied with a little lift of the chin, determined that he shouldn’t see how much his presence intimidated her. “I hope you hanna come to cause me trouble, Mr Lyon. I’ve dressed and fed the babby, and now I’m a-going to report her found.”

“Aye – well …” He looked about him again, his uneasiness obvious, and she could smell the clinging reek of liquor he’d brought in with him. “It’s on account o’ that I’m here. No point mincing words. I’ll put it to you straight and square, Mrs Cresswell. I dunna want the authorities to know about this babby, so if you’ll take it in and look after it a bit, I’m prepared to gi’ you ninepence a week for your trouble.”

“You what –?”

For a moment she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. Then, hastily looking over her shoulder to see that Tom had done as he was told and gone outside, “You’ll gi’ me ninepence a week just to keep this little mite o’ yours?”

Jesse sucked at his moustache and nodded. “Mind, dunna let the Missus know I’m paying you. Her’d create merry hell. Pretend you’re only doing it out o’ Christian kindness, like – Kate might swallow some’at or other like that after seeing this morning’s performance.”

Still disbelieving, Susan hesitated to answer.

“You’ll agree to it then, eh?” He was breathing heavily, and she could see the trickle of sweat beads on his forehead.

Cautiously she said, “But surely your wife wunna want the babby stopping here? Not on the Row, not right under her nose. I mean – wi’ the circumstances being as they are –”

“Kate’ll just have to lump the ruddy circumstances if her knows what’s good for her.”

Out of the corner of his eye Jesse shot the baby a look that was barbed with bitter resentment for its existence – resentment and something else. Discomfiture, perhaps; or guilt.

Catching the look, Susan said on a quick, defending, note, “It’s a little wench, in case you’re wondering.”

“A wench.”

This inform. . .