Page 11

Chapter Eleven

I panicked all over the inn, going into all the downstairs rooms to see if there was any trace of Mrs Rose. I found the innkeeper’s wife and her cook taking the morning rolls out of the oven and, when I told them what had happened, the innkeeper’s wife sent the cook out to tell my driver what had occurred, then sat me down at the kitchen table and poured me a strong coffee.

‘Mrs Rose,’ she said, ‘I have always been wary of her, but she is well connected in Kelso.’ Her hands worried from her hips to her chin to her apron and she shook her head all the while. ‘What a bad business. A terrible to-do.’

‘She has left me with only pennies.’ The coffee was too hot and too thick and too sour, but I sipped it anyway, trying to get my head straight.

‘She consorts with the widower Dr McTavish and I have never liked him, but he will be furious she is gone,’ Mrs Baxter said. ‘He’s quite an influential man, Mistress Dickson. I hope he does not blame us for her disappearance. Mibbie she’ll see sense and come back.’

‘She’ll not be back,’ I replied bitterly. ‘She has my life savings.’

‘Oh, hen,’ sympathized the woman. ‘Shall we fetch the constable?’

I thought hard about that and nearly said yes, but what if they said I ought to return to my own home? And where had the money come from in the first place, for had I not stolen it from Spencer, who had obtained it from smuggled goods?

I shook my head. ‘It is gone now,’ I said.

There was a knock on the kitchen door and my coach driver stood, looking awkward, folding and unfolding his hat.

‘I’ve heard you’ve been robbed, Mistress Dickson,’ he said. ‘Seems Mrs Rose has taken one of the horses too – a decent one at that. Myself and the ostler shall take a couple of horses ourselves and see if she’s in the vicinity, and find out if the night watchman saw anything. We can delay our journey by an hour or so, but no more.’

Off he went, and I felt grateful that someone was looking out for me and hoped hard that Mrs Rose had not got very far at all. The cook returned and gave me a morning roll, but it soon became too crowded for the three of us in there, so I went back upstairs to sort out the mess of the room and have a think about what on God’s earth I was going to do.

I had already paid my London fare, so I could still travel. I had a few pennies and that might see me all right for food. Mibbie the driver would help too, for he seemed a bit sorry for me. But then I would arrive in London with nothing to my name and nowhere to sleep. Oh, curse that awful bitch, Mrs Rose. Rose by name: beautiful, but thorned. Is my life blighted that everyone I come across will betray me? I looked around me at the clothes strewn across the floor, the mess my creel was in, and I could not move a muscle. The only thing I saw fit to do was get back under the bedspread, utterly defeated, and sob my poor heart out. So that is what I did.

A while passed. I felt the sun go behind clouds and come out again. I wept. I caught a whiff of how rancid my armpits had become and cared not a jot about it. Mrs Rose had probably taken my armpit powder too. I heard carts leave and folk creak about the stairs, and I felt so exhausted they would have to carry me out.

Eventually the innkeeper’s wife came to my bedside and put her hand on my shoulder.

‘There’s no trace of Mrs Rose, and your driver must leave soon, for his gents need to be on their way,’ she said. ‘Are you travelling today? He says he can take you now, or else he will owe you the rest of the journey the next time he calls, but that might be in a month or so.’

I did not answer.

Mrs Baxter sighed and I could sense her looking about the room.

‘Listen to me, Mistress Dickson,’ she went on. ‘You have been hard done by on your way to London. Do not go there without a bit of money behind you. It is not a place to arrive penniless. It will swallow you up.’

My eyes flew open at that, but she did not see, for I was buried under the bedspread.

‘Folk think London’s a place where fortunes are made, but some of the tales I hear in this inn are grim ones. You’d need somewhere decent to stay, for starters. And somewhere nice. Many of streets are strewn with filth, and there are barefoot urchins in the bad parts, who will rob you quicker than Mrs Rose did.’

‘But I have nowhere else to go,’ I mumbled.

‘Well, you can stay here a while,’ she replied. ‘Mrs Rose had paid for her bed for a month and she was only here a week. There’s plenty of work in Kelso. What line of work are you in?’

‘I’m a Fisherrow girl,’ I said.

‘A Fisherrow fishwife?’ she cried. ‘All the way down here? Well, never mind that. I don’t ask people’s business, but your folks are well known as hard workers. Famously so.’

I nodded, still under the blanket, but listening intently now.

‘A Fisherrow lass,’ she mused. ‘Well, I never in all my days thought I would see a Fisherrow lass in my own inn. The hardiest women in Scotland, and one of them right here in the River Inn.’

Are we? I’d had no idea. I’d thought myself ordinary. Ma and Joan too. Now I realized that word of us must travel, for we travel ourselves with our creels as far as the Edinburgh markets, where all sorts of gossip and stories must spread. I felt a flicker of pride in my home town. It surprised me.

‘Well, I would take you on myself,’ she said with a delighted chortle. ‘In the kitchen or serving. Anywhere in fact. I bet you could gut a trout in a flash. I bet you’d show us how it’s done.’

I nodded again.

‘And carry heavy loads?’

Heavier than some lads could.

‘I pay sensible wages too,’ she added. ‘You could save.’

I pulled the blanket away from my face.

‘Kelso’s a good place,’ she continued. ‘Never mind what happened with Mrs Rose. We have a decent trade, and most folks are kind. What do you say?’

What could I say? ‘I should be most grateful for that chance,’ I told her.

Mrs Baxter looked pleased as could be. Then she hesitated. ‘You are a good girl, though, aren’t you? You’re not a runaway or anything like that?’

‘Certainly not,’ I lied.

‘And I do not mean to pry, but you are a maiden, aren’t you? And free to make your own decisions. Free to work? There’s not a husband who’s going to come looking for you, causing all sorts of trouble for us all? It’s just that I see you wear a ring, but it looks like a paste one to me.’

‘That’s right, Mrs Baxter. I’m no one’s property but my own,’ I lied. ‘I wear the ring to keep men from bothering me.’ I dared not tell her about Spencer and that I didn’t even know if my husband was dead or alive, in case she changed her mind.

She nodded, folding her arms in front of her. She was a stout woman of forty years or so. Plain-faced with watery eyes and a chin that sank into her bosom. Her apron was grey, but pristine. Ma always admired a woman who kept a clean apron. ‘A clean apron is like a neat line of laundering hanging in the back close,’ she’d say. ‘The mark of a respectable housewife.’

I needed respectable. I needed pristine. I needed a decent bit of luck now, after all the calamities that had befallen me. As if she could read my thoughts, Mrs Baxter chewed her lip and fixed me with a certain stare before saying what came next.

‘Now, Mistress Dickson, I am taking you on trust, for I believe you to be a decent lass from hard-working folks.’

I opened my mouth to say something, but she carried on talking over me.

‘Mistress Dickson,’ she went on, blinking slowly, seeming to enjoy how my name hissed a little in her mouth. ‘The River Inn is a place where folks come and go, but at the heart of it are hard-working, honest Kelso folks, who go by our reputations. On the roads between Scotland and England there are inns, and there are inns , if you catch my drift. Ours is a good inn. There are always going to be folks like Mrs Rose, and the kind of gents who enjoy her company. But those are the patrons, and we are the proprietors. In other words, Mistress Dickson, we keep an honest household. We must, for the parish officers come calling quite often and they would like us shut down, for they think we are a house of loose morals. But if I was to ban every whore and every thief from this inn, I would likely close down within a month, so I have to turn a blind eye to much of what goes on downstairs in the public rooms, and often in the bedrooms. But we who work here are above scandal.’

‘Of course,’ I whispered.

‘Any whiff of scandal and I would have to put you out on your arse,’ she added. I flinched at her language. ‘I’ve hired maids before, and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. I had to send the last one home, for she got herself into trouble with a patron. Off she went to the House of Correction, but that’s what happens if you don’t obey the house-rules.’

‘The House of Correction?’

‘Oh, you must have seen it on your way into town,’ Mrs Baxter replied airily. ‘The big house on the outskirts, with the high wall. It’s where the parish officers send the vagrants and beggars, and the thieves and whores.’

I frowned at that, but she did not seem to notice. I had not seen any such thing as a House of Correction, but I suppose I didn’t really know what one looked like.

‘Well, you can start tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I am pleased we have struck a deal.

My plan hatched, as a creature from an egg. Delicate at first, but then bolder and with all the urgency of new life.

I would stay a while working at the River Inn and save, and then depart for London. I was still desperate to go. It was a dream and I wanted more from life than to be stuck in a market town, but it would have to do for now. The River Inn had the feel of busyness and of being at the heart of the travelling route. It was as good a place as any to get myself set up again whilst the rest of the winter passed. The Baxters – the innkeeper and his shrewd wife – ran a tight ship, but I trusted them. As long as I worked hard and lived up to my reputation as a reliable fishergirl, seeking her fortune in the world, they would do me right.

So there I was, for the time being. Nestled amongst thatched cottages and handsome town houses with gardens and orchards and surrounded by peaceful farms. Nice and clean, and not a whiff of sea air nor a speck of sand. Just a market town where the Tweed and Teviot shake hands. A town as sturdy and sure and drab as the brown trout that filled its rivers. And I dare say that would suit hundreds of girls like me. In fact they might even count themselves lucky to have landed on their feet like this, after such a close shave.

But not me. Oh dear, I wish it was me, but the yearnings would not stop. I still hankered for London and, when I heard the morning carts roll out of the yard, humming with forward thrust southwards, I vowed that would be me one day soon.

Sometimes I would catch a flash of my ma and Joan. They would come to me in the kitchen, when Cook fried fish, or by the hearth when I washed and dried my stockings and they dangled in rows.

At night, in the very dark and still of it, when nothing moved save the rustle of rats in the courtyard hay, I imagined Spencer whispering to me from a far-off sea. And, despite everything, I imagined these words: I miss you.

Mrs Baxter took me on as her assistant, serving the patrons and helping clean the rooms, and that kind of solid work kept the Fisherrow ghosts at bay.

I had nothing to do with the stables or with taking money. Mr Baxter oversaw all of that himself. Mrs Baxter and her cook made all the meals, but I was an extra pair of hands for running about and washing pots, and she often declared that she did not know what she ever did without me; and now that I was here her life was ten times easier, as I did the work of ten men and was far better than any other of the helps she had ever hired; and it was true what they said about the fishwives of Fisherrow: reliable and hard-working and decent to the very core.

Well, for my part, it was hard work all right and long hours from breakfast to after supper, but all far easier than dealing with bait and lines and cut fingers and stinking fish and heavy creels, and taking up lazy Joan’s slack.

But increasingly my thoughts turned to home. To Ma mostly. She would not know whether I was dead or alive. How long would it be before they would all stop talking of me? When would they start to think me gone for ever? When would I become unmentioned?

I soon discovered what Mrs Baxter had meant when she talked of the parish officers and their House of Correction. Late one evening, just as the ales were fizzing down to their dregs, the front door flew open. Two men in high hats stalked in, carrying brass lanterns.

‘The parish officers are here,’ I heard Mr Baxter call to his wife out back, his voice sounding strangled.

There was a flurry of activity around the room, as if a gust had blasted in. Books were tidied into bags, backs straightened, dice and playing cards pocketed. A man who had been singing a bawdy song about a street called Grope Lane fell silent.

The men walked up to the bar and would not sit down, nor take a drink, even when Mr Baxter tried to insist.

‘We do not drink spirits, and we do not take alcohol of any sort in public,’ I heard one of them say.

Mr Baxter nodded to me with a look that meant carry on as you were doing , so I continued to wipe tables with my damp cloth and pick up empty cups and glasses. The atmosphere was so tense, with no one saying anything at all, that I could not escape into the kitchen fast enough. There Mrs Baxter and Cook stood with their dish rags slung over their shoulders, looking grave.

‘They visit once a month or so,’ Mrs Baxter said to me in a low voice. ‘They are looking for any excuse to shut us down.’

‘They think we are an immoral establishment,’ observed Cook. ‘And ought not to sell any alcohol, nor let women in the door.’

‘Utter nonsense,’ spat Mrs Baxter. ‘It makes me furious that they throw their weight about.’

Cook shifted from one foot to the other. ‘We are not careful enough, Mrs Baxter,’ she said. ‘You know my thoughts on the matter.’ She turned to me.

The low rumble of voices at the other side of the kitchen door told me that the parish officers were in conversation with Mr Baxter.

‘You are our third kitchen maid in three years, Mistress Dickson,’ she continued, with a flourish of her dish rag as she brought it from her shoulder and toyed with it idly. ‘The one before you got herself into quite a fix.’

‘’Tis easy done,’ murmured Mrs Baxter.

‘There are fellows who will promise you a betrothal if you lie with them,’ said Cook. ‘And plenty of them come through these doors. Mrs Baxter here had to throw the last girl out for coming to her complaining she had been promised a betrothal, then had woken to find the chap gone and a baby started, didn’t you, Mrs Baxter?’

My landlady tutted and nodded her head sadly.

‘And where is she now, the last girl?’ Cook asked the question, but answered herself, in hushed tones, sucking her teeth as she spoke. ‘She was sent to the House of Correction and she gave birth there, and now the babe is under the care of the parish, for she will never be able to take care of it. Wet-nursed at Muir Farm and apprenticed there when it turns fourteen.’

A log cracked in the fire and the cauldron that hung over it sizzled, a teardrop of soup oozing down the side. My armpits prickled.

‘The parish officers will not stay long,’ said Mrs Baxter, rubbing at the faint bristle on her chin, as if trying to reassure herself more than us. ‘Let’s busy ourselves with that stock-count of the pantry cupboard. Maggie, see to those pots.’

The pair made their way into the cupboard, their backsides at the door, their apron strings tied in neat loops. As they counted packets of tea and boxes of white pepper, and jars of preserved plums and raspberry jams, I lathered the pots with weak soft soap and tried to give them a decent scrub in the tin bath of tepid water. I could not stop thinking of the woman sent to the House of Correction, beside beggars and vagrants and thieves. Of the baby, dragged up by folk who were not even its kin, and put to work as soon as it was able.

When I went back into the parlour, the parish officers were gone and the mood was lighter. A new game of dice was up. As I put glasses back on shelves, Mr and Mrs Baxter chatted in low, worried voices.

‘They checked the visitors’ book and seemed satisfied. They had a good look around the place and asked the patrons for their names and their business. They were assured that we were hoarding no highwaymen or prostitutes,’ Mr Baxter told his wife.

‘It is a good thing Mrs Rose went when she did,’ his wife commented. ‘They would have had something to say about her.’

‘I am sure Dr McTavish would have stepped in and stopped her being thrown out,’ said Mr Baxter. ‘He knows the parish officers too well.’

‘Well, we live to fight another day,’ replied Mrs Baxter. ‘They would need a good reason to close down this parlour.’

It worried me, talk like that. For I was not protected – not like Mrs Rose. I could not put a foot wrong, not if I was to stay at the inn long enough to save for London.