A Cornish Orphan, page 17
‘Come and have a warm.’ The doctor looked at her kindly. ‘Warm your hands, little one.’
‘I’m nearly twelve now,’ Lottie reminded him, and suddenly she couldn’t speak. The warm, bright fire filled her with longing. She spread her sore, cold fingers and let the heat soak into her. If only she could bring Jenny here. But she couldn’t. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t.
The Red Cross ambulance nosed its way through the cobbled alleyways of Downlong, its engine grinding and spitting out puffs of acrid smoke. Harassed women, their wrists red-raw from the wind and the washing soda, scurried to haul their lines of washing out of the way. Maudie Tripconey followed the ambulance without appearing to do so, her stout body engulfed in a trench coat, her eyes gleaming with curiosity as they peered from the folds of a thick maroon red scarf.
The ambulance came to a halt outside the Lanroskas’ cottage. Maudie parked herself against a wall, out of the wind, a wisp of guilt drifting through her heart as she watched Jenny being carried out on a stretcher. They had covered her with a scarlet blanket and the colour was alarming, like a scream in the night. Maudie wondered why she should feel an unexpected rush of concern for a woman she had never liked. Jenny looked oddly dignified, asleep with her pretty face turned towards the sea.
Who’s gonna look after those children? Maudie thought, and a little voice nagged in her heart. It’s time you did something to help, Maudie, hotly followed by another, harder thought, but not that older boy, Matt. He’s evil. Those boys are always fighting, always filthy dirty. But Lottie – she’s a lovely little girl.
The slam of the ambulance doors, the ringing of its bell, and the way its protesting engine sent a shudder through the terrace of granite cottages was frightening to a quiet Cornish community. Maudie glanced at the serious faces of neighbours standing in their doorways or watching from windows. She made it her business to walk up to the Lanroskas’ cottage and confront the doctor’s wife who stood in the street, her arms around the three children. Maudie glanced disdainfully at grubby, snivelling Tom, swept over Matt’s hostile stare, and smiled at Lottie who was trying to comfort Tom.
They all listened to the ambulance bell getting fainter and fainter as it headed along Wharf Road and up the long hill out of St Ives.
‘Who’s gonna take care of these children now?’ Maudie asked.
The doctor’s wife gave her an altruistic stare. ‘They’re coming home with me for now.’
‘They’ve got no one,’ Maudie reminded her. ‘Their grandad, Vic – he’s gone off – down Newlyn, he’s gone. Couldn’t bear staying here after he lost his son. And that old woman – Nan Lanroska – she’s their great grandmother, and she’s crazy.’
‘As I said, Maudie, the children are coming with me for now.’
‘Well, as far as I’m concerned, they’re orphans – and something should be done about it.’
A plan hatched in Maudie’s mind as she walked home. She’d heard the whispers. Jenny had lost the use of her legs. It had to be polio. Even if she did recover, it meant months, even years of being in hospital. Maudie knew the doctor’s wife didn’t want children, especially not a raggedy bunch like the Lanroskas.
Maudie walked faster and faster through the winter light. In her hall at home was a telephone. It had been installed six weeks ago, and Maudie was proud of it. She kept it dusted and polished, but she hadn’t dared use it yet.
Inside she took off her trench coat and scarf, and hovered over the intimidating telephone, her heart thumping as she lifted the receiver.
‘Nan would look after us,’ Lottie said desperately.
The doctor’s wife shook her head. ‘Oh, I don’t think so, dear. She’s not fit enough to cope with three lively children.’
‘I could live with Grandad,’ Matt boasted.
‘And where does he live?’
‘Down Newlyn.’
‘In a house?’
‘No. He lives in a beach hut.’
‘Then he can’t look after you, can he?’
Matt shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’
The three children were huddled in the corner of the doctor’s brown leather sofa. Mrs Tregullow had given them a meal of shepherd’s pie and a mound of soft white cauliflower followed by apple dumplings and custard. They’d eaten every scrap, and the hot food had calmed them. Tom had eaten his too fast and he was burping and still crying as he leaned against Lottie. ‘What’s wrong with our mummy?’ he kept asking.
‘We think she’s got polio,’ Mrs Tregullow explained, again. ‘She’ll be well looked after in Truro City Hospital, but it will take a long time to make her better.’
‘I want to see her,’ Tom pleaded.
‘You can’t, dear. Not yet. When she’s a bit better, you can go.’
‘But I don’t know where Truro is,’ Tom said tearfully.
‘I do.’ Lottie held him close, finding the warmth of him comforting. ‘I can take you when we’re allowed to go.’
‘There you are. You’ve got a lovely big sister, Tom,’ Mrs Tregullow wagged a finger, ‘and whatever happens, you three children must stick together. Look after each other. You remember that.’ She got up to answer the doorbell.
Then everything happened so quickly. One minute they were huddled on the brown sofa, and the next they were being marched outside by two hefty policemen.
‘But we haven’t done anything wrong!’ protested Lottie.
The policeman looked at her kindly, and he had long eyelashes, like Arnie. ‘I know you haven’t. We’re just going to take you to a nice home where you can live until your mummy’s better.’
‘But we want to stay here,’ Lottie said. ‘I hope it’s not an orphanage, because if it is, I won’t go.’
Matt looked at Lottie with fire in his eyes. ‘RUN,’ he cried, and darted towards the door. The two policemen acted swiftly, one grabbing Matt and the other Tom. Matt howled and kicked. He struggled wildly but the policeman skilfully pinned his arms behind his back and handcuffed him. ‘Sorry we’ve got to do this, lad, but if you won’t come quietly, that’s what happens.’ He picked Matt up and carried him to the black police car parked outside. ‘Don’t you want a ride in our limo?’
Tom threw himself on the floor. ‘Don’t take my brother away!’
‘We won’t. We’re taking all three of you. Now – do I have to handcuff you, young man? Or will you come quietly?’
Tom trembled from head to toe. He managed to stand up. ‘I’ll come quietly – but only if Lottie’s coming.’ He looked up at Lottie with tormented eyes.
‘RUN, LOTTIE,’ Matt yelled from inside the car.
‘You remember what I said, Lottie.’ Mrs Tregullow looked into Lottie’s eyes. ‘Stick together.’
Lottie felt torn. She watched Tom being bundled into the back seat of the police car, looking back at her appealingly. She thought of Nan. She thought of her long-ago mother. She felt responsible for the two boys, her brothers.
She stood on the doorstep, feeling desolate, feeling her life being wrenched and twisted with every scream of every seagull that dived over the streets of St Ives.
‘I hope you’re going to be sensible, young lady.’ The policeman touched her gingerly, the brass button on his cuff catching in a tendril of her flowing honey-gold hair.
Lottie drew herself up taller. ‘Don’t you dare touch me,’ she snapped, twisting out of reach. ‘I shall walk to the car on my own.’
The two policemen jumped back and escorted her at a respectful distance, one leaning forward to open the passenger door. Lottie squeezed in, next to Tom. She sat up very straight and swung her legs in gracefully. ‘You may shut the door,’ she said to the policeman. She wondered why his eyes twinkled under those long lashes, since it was not an occasion for twinkles of amusement.
The car pulled away, lurching through Downlong, then purring along Wharf Road and heading out of St Ives. No one spoke. Lottie could feel Matt’s fury and humiliation, she could feel Tom’s anxiety, and she turned her head away from them, pressing her face to the window as the car climbed the hill, past the station and on towards Carbis Bay. The sea sparkled like never before, as if every single sparkle was waving goodbye. Would she ever see St Ives again? Would she see the sun and the moon shining across the bay, making a path of light? Would she ever see Nan again and hear her stories? As they drew near to Carrack Gladden, Lottie remembered the legend of the maiden’s tears. She imagined the tears dripping through the rocks, for now they would be her own tears falling from a new and paralysing grief.
For the second time in her young life, Lottie had lost everything; everything and everyone she had grown to love.
Chapter 14
Separation
The police car bumped and rattled along the rough road out of St Ives, the sun setting behind them, a ball of fire in a wintery sky, its fading light dusting the estuary sands of Hayle. Vast flocks of birds flew in swerving patterns, their bellies lit like grains of wheat in the low sunlight. The policeman in the passenger seat turned and tried to smile kindly. ‘My name is P.C. Roach,’ he said, ‘and you can talk to me if you want. I know it’s a tough time for you.’
Nobody smiled back.
‘Can I open the window please?’ Lottie asked.
‘Want some fresh air, do you? Turn the handle – go on, push it hard.’
Lottie struggled with the bright chrome handle and managed to wind the thick glass window down just enough for her to hear the haunting cry of the curlews and oyster catchers, and the majestic siren of a steamship out in the bay waiting for the tide. Thoughts of escape fluttered through her mind. She touched the door handle, waiting for the car to stop at a junction and she glanced at Matt who was curled up in a ball. His eyes gazed back at her and, oddly, it was the longest, most meaningful look that had ever passed between them. A sudden, overwhelming gift of friendship. Matt had never been her friend. But now he was, in this time of shared tragedy and powerlessness. A true friend, like Arnie reborn.
‘The doors are locked,’ said P.C. Roach, ‘so don’t even think about trying to get out.’
Lottie and Matt looked at each other, and at the ship out in the bay. Matt had never asked Lottie how she had managed to stow away on a cargo ship and now Lottie wished she had told him. Jenny had forbidden the boys to ask her about the shipwreck and about her old life, but there had been many times when Lottie could have explained it all to Matt. Words just didn’t get through the dense layer of resentment he wore around him. Talking to him now, with the policemen listening, wasn’t an option.
The views of Hayle Bay were soon gone, like the sunset, as if the light of the world was left behind in St Ives. Now they were winding between gorse-covered hills and Cornish hedges topped by bare winter hawthorns and sycamores bent over by westerly gales. A scattering of February celandines were closing their petals for the night, leaving a monochrome landscape of fields, farms and tin mines.
‘I want to go home,’ Tom said. ‘I don’t like this place.’
‘Cuddle up to me.’ Lottie put her arm around him and let him play with the wavy ends of her hair. It quietened him. She had no answers. Only questions.
The car travelled on, through the old mining towns of Camborne and Redruth. Once they stopped at a level crossing to let a train go steaming through.
‘What’s that hill?’ Matt asked, his eyes suddenly alive. ‘You can see it from St Ives. The one with the cross on top.’
‘That’s the Carn Brea,’ P.C. Roach said. ‘Lovely up there. You can see the whole of Cornwall – and at night you can see the lights of St Ives twinkling.’
Matt and Lottie looked at each other with a shared unspoken thought. One day, when we are free, we’ll go up there and sit on those high stacks of granite and see our home far away, twinkling in the night. When we are free.
What had been an interesting journey became scary as they climbed out of Redruth.
‘Wheal Buller Hill,’ said P.C. Roach. ‘Hold tight, you children. I’ve got to put my foot down.’
A thick blanket of mist hung over the hills and the driver headed up into it at breakneck speed. The smell of petrol filled the car and Tom was sick over the floor. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ he cried, white-faced. ‘Why are we going so fast?’
‘’Cause it’s a hill, stupid,’ Matt said, pretending he knew about cars when he didn’t.
The driver didn’t answer. The car lurched as he changed gear, roaring along the rough, stony road. Then down into first gear. ‘If she won’t go up, we’ll have to get out and push,’ he warned. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve pushed a car up Wheal Buller Hill.’
‘What if it runs down backwards?’ Tom asked.
‘It won’t, lad, it’s got brakes.’
But the three children were terrified. Their only experience of being in a motor vehicle was the Flora Day charabanc ride, out in the sunshine with everybody singing. In this dense fog and with darkness falling, and the harsh grind of the engine, even the two burly policemen seemed edgy. ‘Can’t see yer hand in front of yer face in this fog,’ they complained, both leaning forward, straining to see the road, the headlights only making the mist look solid and yellowy like sheep’s fleece.
‘Where are we going?’ Tom kept asking, and no one answered his question. ‘And where’s our mummy?’
Lottie held on to him tightly, trying to ignore the smell of sick and petrol. The mist came right inside the car, freezing cold and damp. She was glad of the warm coat Nan had bought her, but Matt and Tom had only the threadbare jackets they wore to school. Their warm fisherman’s jerseys, knitted by Millie, were left in the cottage along with the things they loved. The boys’ boxes of marbles. The storybooks imbued with happy memories of Arnie. Lottie’s bed with the carved wooden animals. Her collection of shells and crystals. Her knitted doll. Her books. What would happen to it all? And her precious black velvet bag, still hidden at Hendravean. Would Nan guard its secret?
The car braked sharply as another car with glaring headlights came flaring out of the mist. The children were thrown forward and Lottie bruised her lip on the front seat. Tom banged his chin on the handbrake and started to howl the way he’d howled as a five-year-old. Loudly.
The exasperated driver shouted at Tom. ‘Stop that noise. You’re not a baby. We’re nearly there and you’ve got to behave. Be a big boy. If you don’t behave, they won’t take you, and I’ll have to take you miles up-country to a home for bad boys.’
His aggressive tone silenced Tom. They drove on through the fog for what seemed like miles and miles of an invisible land, far away from the sea. An unfriendly, cold, landlocked place.
‘Here we are. That’s it.’ The car turned into a gateway and came to a halt in front of a pair of towering iron gates. The car’s headlights shone on rusting metal bars and glistening, mist-covered cobwebs strung between them. Spiders, thought Lottie, shuddering. A house of spiders.
She looked at Matt as the policeman got out to open the huge gates. Matt’s eyes were frightened black bubbles in the darkness and he seemed to know exactly what Lottie was thinking. In a rare moment of empathy he reached out, found her hand and squeezed it. ‘We stick together,’ he whispered.
‘Stick together,’ Lottie whispered back. ‘Together forever.’
‘My children,’ Jenny said desperately to one of the nurses standing around her bed. She felt in awe of them with their starched white caps and aprons as they bustled silently around the vast building. It was difficult to engage with them. They all seemed preoccupied with charts on clipboards, kidney-shaped bowls and trolleys stacked with medicines and bandages.
She kept drifting in and out of consciousness, waking to a bewildered sense of humiliation, strange young doctors in cardboardy white coats endlessly testing her useless legs and peering into her eyes with torches. It was like drowning. Coming up for air. Then sinking down into the deep dark. Each time she surfaced she asked a question and nobody answered except to tell her she was in hospital. She lost all sense of time, only aware that beyond the brightly lit windows was a blue-dark night muffled by a thick fog. Her children’s faces danced in and out of her mind. Little Tom, still innocent, still needing a nap after school, still her baby. And Matt, heart-stoppingly like Arnie, his long legs and big feet and fathomless eyes. I wish I’d been nicer to you, Matt, Jenny thought. Please God let me have a chance to make it right, be a mother to you, not an ogre. And Lottie. Beautiful, mysterious Lottie. Jenny had wanted her happy and free. Wholesome and confident. But now Lottie was like Cinderella, downtrodden, overworked and desperate. Jenny could hardly bear it.
‘It’s all my fault,’ she mumbled, and opened her eyes to see the tribe of white-coated doctors, students and nurses had moved on down the ward to stand like pillars of salt around someone else’s bed. A nurse in a distinctive navy-blue uniform was drawing the curtains around her bed. She pulled up a chair and sat beside Jenny, offering her a hand to hold, and a pair of loving eyes. She reminded Jenny of Mrs Rabbit in the Beatrix Potter books.
‘My children.’
‘I know, dear. You’re worried sick. Of course you are.’ The nurse looked at her steadily. ‘I’m Sister Jill, dear, and I’ll be here with you every day. I know you’re worried about your children. I’ll send the almoner to see you tomorrow morning. She will find out what is happening to them and help you with any issues you have regarding your home and family.’
‘But tonight? They’ll be alone in the cottage.’
Sister Jill looked at her clipboard. ‘It says on your admission notes that the doctor’s wife in St Ives has taken your children in.’
‘Oh – good. That’s kind of her,’ Jenny said, trying to imagine her two rough and ready boys conforming to Mrs Tregullow’s orderly household. ‘She doesn’t like children. She’d cope with Lottie, but not the boys.’
