Ragamuffin Angel Read Free Page B

think you fooled anyone with that tale? A man’s only got to look at you to see what you are –’  
    ‘That’s enough.’  
    Dan and Art spoke as one but as Dan pushed John backwards, away from the white-faced figure in the doorway on whom the smaller man had been steadily advancing, John swung his body up and round on his youngest brother as though he was going to strike him. And the intention was in his furious face for some seconds before Dan’s steady, quiet stance seemed to check it.  
    ‘By, you make me sick, the pair of you. Soft as clarts.’  
    Neither Dan nor Art answered John but their unity caused the smaller man to grind his teeth before he turned away, gesturing violently at Gilbert and Matthew to follow him. And it was like that, without another word, that the five men left the clearing and made their way back across the fields to the road with their unconscious bundle, there to begin a grim-faced procession back to the lights of Bishopwearmouth.
     

Chapter Two
     
    Poverty is relative. As she opened her eyes to the dim light of morning, Peggy Cook’s weary gaze took in the packed bedroom, in which there wasn’t a spare inch of space unoccupied. Aye, it was relative all right. She remembered her Seth saying that more than once and he hadn’t been a man to waste words on idle chatter. She thought she’d died and gone to heaven when he’d married her and brought her to this cottage, and she still thanked God that she wasn’t ending her days in the East End where she’d lived her first fifteen years. Lived? By, she hadn’t lived – existed more like.  
    She shut her eyes again – Sadie and the bairns weren’t awake yet; the longer they could sleep the better after the horror of the night before – and allowed her mind to drift back over the years.  
    She had been born fifty-five years before, in 1845, one of seventeen children born to her Irish immigrant parents, only seven of whom had survived to adulthood. Her home, a two-up, two-down back-to-back hovel in the East End, had been a place where foul language, brawling, drunkenness and thriftlessness was rife, the cockroaches, rats and bugs vying for food and space along with the human residents.  
    She’d met Seth hop-picking when she was a young lass of fifteen and he a grown man of twenty, out for a walk on his day off from the newly opened Ryhope Colliery with some of his fellow miners. They had married as soon as they were able. He had brought her to this cottage on her wedding day, and although they had shared it with his old mam at first – his da being dead – she had cried tears of thankfulness that night. And in spite of her only giving him the one bairn, their Sadie, he had loved her till he’d been killed in a fall at the pit five Christmases ago.  
    Peggy opened her eyes again, glancing over at the sleeping forms of Sadie and the two children lying in the double brass bed that had been hers and Seth’s for all of their married life. Their Sadie had kicked up a fuss some months before when she’d insisted on moving to the rickety, wooden bed in the corner of the room that had been Sadie’s before she’d left to get married, but to tell the truth it wasn’t just because Sadie needed the room, her being with child again. Her arthritis gave her gyp these days and it was more comfortable in her single berth without any stray elbows or knees catching her unawares; the bairns were restless sleepers like their mam, especially Connie.  
    Connie . . . Peggy’s gaze softened as it took in the small form of her granddaughter curled beneath the scant covers like a tiny animal trying to conserve all its warmth. In spite of Sadie having banked up the fire the night before in the sitting room cum kitchen – the other room the tiny cottage boasted – the bedroom was icy-cold, although the interconnecting door was ajar. She was glad her Seth had had two years with his granddaughter before he’d died; he’d fair worshipped the