Liza Read Free

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.’
    He was, at being hailed from his bed, with his jacket and trousers pulled on over his nightshirt. He had not expected this call for another month and did not like the sound of it. His only consolation was the knowledge that his fee for the confinement had already been paid. Kitty had scraped it together over months of penny-pinching economies.
    The women by the bed moved out of his way as he shed his damp ulster and tossed it aside with his hat. Jinnie said, ‘She’s having a bad time, Doctor.’
    He grunted, washed his hands in the bowl they brought him and examined his patient.
    When he stood back Aggie asked, ‘Will she be all right, Doctor?’
    ‘ We’ll see,’ he replied guardedly. ‘She’s not young to be having her first child . .
    ‘ Ah! Dear, dear!’ Aggie sighed.
    ‘ Andrew! Oh, Andrew !’ Kitty cried out.
    ‘ Now then,’ the doctor said. And braced himself.
    The child was born as the light of dawn showed grey through the curtains over the windows. Jinnie handed the scrap to Kitty and asked, ‘What are you going to call her?’
    Kitty, small in the bed and exhausted now, managed a smile and replied, ‘Eliza. Nicer than Kitty.’
    ‘ If the poor little bairn lives,’ Aggie muttered, under her breath.

     
    2
     
    17 FEBRUARY 1886, SUNDERLAND
     
    In the afternoon of that day Millicent Spencer called for her doctor. He came quickly to the comfortable house on the hill that