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Fortunes of the Heart
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Fortunes of the Heart
Jenny Telfer Chaplin
© Jenny Telfer Chaplin 2013
Jenny Telfer Chaplin has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published 2004 by BeWrite Books
This edition published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Part One – The Early Years
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part 2
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Extract from Treason by Meredith Whitford
Acknowledgements
Chief Librarian Eddie Monaghan and his staff for their patience, help, and expertise during my many years of research at the Rothesay Public Library on the Scottish Island of Bute.
To world-famous novelist Evelyn Hood for her ongoing friendship and encouragement over the years.
Part One – The Early Years
Chapter 1
Pearce decided he must talk to his father before Kate ‘showed’ and greatly daring, Kate had lingered in the hallway outside Pearce’s father’s study.
She missed Pearce’s opening, but his father’s bellow was loud and clear: “Damnation man, not again. This is too much. You’ve already run up gambling debts you can’t pay and now you tell me you’ve got your sister’s lady’s maid with child. Are there any more?”
“Certainly not, father. What do you take me for?”
“A bloody stupid young fool who doesn’t learn from his mistakes. That’s what. You should have stayed in Canada out of sight.”
After a short silence, Pearce said something Kate didn’t catch.
“What’s to do now?” Mr Kinnon shouted. “What’s to do now? Pay the baggage off. I’ll need to do that, I suppose, yet again. Then get her out of this house this very night.”
Kate had jumped at a touch on her arm and turned to see Mistress Martha, her face red, staring at her.
Without knocking, Martha pushed Kate ahead of her into the study.
“Damnation, Martha, this is not woman’s business.”
“She is my maid, father. Of course, it’s my business.”
Martha turned to Kate. “Is this true? Are you with child?” Kate nodded, thinking she had an ally.
“You’ll get no reference from me. The very idea, sneaking around seducing my brother. Father, pay her now. She can collect her things and go.”
“I’ll not have another life on my conscience,” Pearce said quietly.
His sister and father stared at him.
“It’s a bit late for that,” his father said.
“And how will you avoid that?” his sister sneered. “Marry her?”
Pearce stood silent for a moment frowning before he nodded. “Yes.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus, Pearce, be sensible,” his father said. “That’s impossible. I won’t have it.”
Martha laughed. “I was joking, Pearce. There are no brothers to worry about this time, you know. You’re quite safe.”
His face scarlet, Pearce shouted, “I was never afraid of the brothers. It was the family that feared the scandal. I will marry Kate.”
“Don’t I get a say in this?” Kate said, and recoiled when all three shouted: “No.”
“For God’s sake, Pearce,” his father said, “don’t let your stubborn pride and pig-headedness back you into this stupidity.”
Pearce glared at his father. “My mind’s made up. I will marry Kate.”
“You haven’t asked me yet,” Kate protested.
“You will marry me.” It was a statement and not a question, but Kate nodded, then said: “Yes.”
“You’ll not get a penny piece of mine if you do. Neither of you.”
Pearce swept Kate out of the room, told her to collect her possessions – such as they were – while he ordered the carriage to take them to the nearby town.
The marriage in the Registry Office in Belfast before they caught the ferry from Lame was not quite what Kate had envisaged, but they were married.
Chapter 2
Kate drew her woollen shawl tightly round her shoulders. She shivered as she watched the dark, forbidding banks of the River Clyde lined with docks and warehouses so different from the green fields of Ireland, drift past on their way to their destination, The Broomielaw. The passage across the Irish Sea from Lame had been anything but smooth. Kate felt she would have been queasy anyway, but the motion of the ship and the smell of unwashed clothes and bodies in steerage had made her morning sickness unbearable.
She looked up at the tall, handsome man beside her. My husband – she savoured the words – my husband.
In his fine woollen suit and Ulster cape he stood head and shoulders above the other men thronging the deck.
Kate’s nose wrinkled at the stench from the river blending now with the offensive odour from the steerage passengers.
“Why are we going steerage?” she had asked Pearce, her husband of three days – her husband.
He had brushed the question aside in his cultured accent. “A temporary financial embarrassment, my dear. That’s all. Nothing for you to worry about. We’ll be back on our feet in no time.”
Kate coughed and Pearce glanced down at her. “You are not going to be sick again, are you? We’re almost there.”
Shaking her head Kate said: “No ... no, I’m fine.” She hoped she would be, if they tied up soon.
The gangway secured, passengers streamed off, but Pearce waited till the rush abated before he turned to Kate. “Right, Kate, we’ll go now. Pick up your bundles.”
Pearce picked up his two bags and strode down the gangway with Kate stumbling after him clutching her two bundles to her chest.
“Why on earth don’t you have proper bags?” Pearce said, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “Wait here.”
He marched over to a group of men lounging at the entrance to the quay. They watched his approach and Kate saw them eying him up and down obviously appraising his clothes and bearing. Short of them he stopped and snapped his fingers. The men got to their feet and one, touching his forelock, stepped forward.
“Kin we dae somethin fur ye, sur?”
Kate couldn’t really understand the dialect but the gesture and the intonation were
unmistakable – her husband was gentry.
Pearce said something to the man, indicating his bags.
“Come, Kate.” He walked smartly off the dock.
The man picked up Pearce’s bags, grinned at Kate, and Kate, with a sigh, heaved her bundles up again and trekked after them. They crossed several streets redolent with ammonia and recent droppings from the many horses. Finally, they stopped on a street with iron rails in the middle. The man put the bags down. Pearce handed him a coin. The man touched his forelock and left them.
Kate wasn’t anxious to put her bundles down on the dirty street. She balanced them on Pearce’s bags and waited.
“There will be a tram along shortly, Kate,” Pearce said. “Until I get established again we have to watch our pennies.”
“A tram?” Kate questioned.
“Yes, a tram. A public conveyance that travels on those iron rails drawn by two horses. God, do you know nothing?”
Kate made no reply, waiting in silence as she often had in the past as a lady’s maid when the mistress was out of sorts.
Eventually a tram arrived and Kate clambered aboard with her bundles, following Pearce. After what seemed a long journey, Pearce got to his feet.
“We get off here.”
On the street as the tram pulled away, Kate looked round and was not impressed, but Pearce turned to her.
“There, across the Glasgow Green. My aunt has her town house there. It’s a little early for her to be up and about, but my cousin Calum may be in town. Come, Kate.”
The houses across the Green were grand, Kate thought, even grander than Laggan House in Ireland. Could she ever be the lady of such a house?
Pearce walked boldly up to the front door of one of these mansions and pounded the door soundly with the brass knocker.
The pert young housemaid who answered, bobbed a quick courtesy to Pearce: “Oh, Mr Kinnon. The mistress isn’t about yet. Was she expecting you?”
“No ... not this early. We’ll wait.”
“Oh, certainly, sir. Please come in. I’ll have a fire set in the morning room.”
She glanced at Kate as she followed on Pearce’s heels into the morning room, but made no comment.
Almost at once a young girl, the tweenie, Kate thought, bustled in and, completely ignored by Pearce, laid and lit the fire.
Chapter 3
As Kate watched the girl at work she could see herself four years ago ...
A recent orphan, lucky to have been taken in by Laggan House she was told, Kate, the tweenie, did all the work that was beneath the dignity of even the lowest housemaid.
Fires had to be cleaned, laid and set, and scuttles replenished before the gentry stirred; water heated and jugs set out ready for the housemaids to carry upstairs; the gentry safely ensconced in the breakfast room, chamber pots to be removed, emptied, and cleaned; breakfast dishes to wash; vegetables to prepare; laundry to be sorted for the laundress. At everyone’s beck and call but never to be seen or heard by the upstairs gentry and certainly never to be acknowledged by them if accidentally encountered.
Kate sighed. Had she only been the tweenie for a year? It had seemed an eternity of first up in the morning and last to bed at night with never a moment’s rest in between.
The mistress had been outraged that the tweenie would dare touch a book in the library then reluctantly intrigued that a tweenie could actually read or even want to read. When she heard Kate speak, she was even more surprised. The local accent for sure, but more refined and educated than most locals and certainly well beyond what the mistress expected of one of the lower house servants. The refined accent that had caused so much grief for Kate from the other servants as a tweenie was her salvation. The lordly butler himself saw her trained through upstairs maid to parlour-maid where she was actually seen and occasionally even acknowledged by the gentry.
When the lady’s maid to the unmarried daughter of the house took ill Kate was unexpectedly elevated to the dizzy heights of lady’s maid.
“I really don’t know what those duties are,” she stammered.
“Nonsense, girl, just do what I tell you and you’ll be fine. If I’m not pleased you’ll hear all about it,” was the reply.
And Kate had heard about it. She’d endured scoldings, deserved and undeserved, but she’d survived. Mistress Martha like her mother was obviously intrigued by Kate’s background. Unlike her mother, however, she pursued her interest and in long sessions of Kate brushing her mistress’s hair she heard of Kate’s mother’s death in childbirth when Kate was twelve and of the death of her father, a weaver and lay Baptist preacher when Kate was fourteen.
“Oh, that’s why you don’t go to Mass with the others,” she said, and with that Mistress Martha dropped the subject, her curiosity satisfied.
In the early spring of 1877, Kate had heard from her mistress that her older brother, Pearce, was to return to Ireland and Laggan House. The other servants, when the housekeeper and butler were out of earshot, eagerly filled in the details.
Pearce had been dispatched to the Colonies some six or seven years before in disgrace. Gambling debts he couldn’t meet, some said, but others hinted a darker secrets ... a maid seduced and great with child drowning herself in the river and her brothers vowing vengeance.
Kate had laughed. If the latter story was true, why was he returning?
“The girl’s brothers sailed to America last autumn,” the upstairs maid whispered.
Pearce had arrived, a splendid figure of a man. He had scandalised the housekeeper and cook to their audible disapproval in the servants hall by lounging in his sister’s room while Kate brushed Mistress Martha’s hair.
“These manners might be all very well in the colonies,” they agreed, “but here in Ireland ...?”
At first, Kate was disconcerted by Pearce’s stare, but became used to it.
One afternoon off, she met him on the street of the small town near to Laggan House. He doffed his hat to her, just as if she were a lady, and invited her to have afternoon tea with him in the one small teashop the town main street boasted. Embarrassed, she stammered out a refusal, then flattered by his insistence she agreed. In the course of their conversation, she told him that in her limited free time she retreated to a secluded gazebo to read.
Much to her surprise, he began to meet her there and soon they became lovers. In the house, he was cool, formal, and polite, but in their arbour, he was ardent.
When she told him she was pregnant, he was stunned, then furious. Kate could still see his face when she had shouted back: “I didn’t do it by myself, did I?”
At his question of which of the menservants was the happy father she slapped his face and would have fled had he not caught and held her. They ended by making love and Pearce saying that all would work out and he would take care of everything.
Chapter 4
Kate’s reverie was interrupted by a man about Pearce’s age bursting into the morning room.
“Pearce, you dog. How romantic, eloping with your bride. I’d never have expected it of you.”
He and Pearce embraced.
“We got your telegram yesterday. My mother has been planning events and calls for you non-stop ever since. But why so early? We thought you’d leave your card at a more civilised hour. Your aunt won’t be presentable for at least another hour ... if then. Which hotel are you staying at?”
He stopped for breath and Pearce finally managed to speak.
“There is a slight problem, Calum. Purely a temporary financial embarrassment.” Pearce coughed. “I wondered if we could stay here.”
“Oh, I see. Yes, I suppose that would be possible.” He glanced at Kate. “Your lady’s maid would need to share a room with one of our servants. Oh dear. Your lady hasn’t been waiting outside in a cab all this time?”
Pearce coughed again. “Calum, this is my wife. Kate, this is my cousin Calum with whom I shared many boyish adventures.”
Calum flushed and made a sort of half bow to Kate.
“Charmed, I’m sure.” Without waiting for any response from Kate, he rushed on: “Pearce, this is not quite what Mama envisaged.”
His face cleared. “I see now. This is one of your jokes, that’s it. Come now, this would not do for Mama. She would not see the humour of it. Come, let’s collect your bride before Mama appears.”
“Calum, this is my wife.” The flat tone admitted no argument.
“Oh ...” for once, Calum was speechless.
Kate said: “I’m very pleased to meet you, Calum.”
Calum visibly winced at her accent.
“Oh, dear. Oh dear. No, Mama will not be pleased.”
“And what’s wrong with my speech? If I may ask?” Kate said.
“Be quiet, Kate,” Pearce said. “Calum meant no offence.”
“I will not be quiet. It’s not bog Irish. My father was a lay preacher.”
“Oh dear. No, Mama will not be pleased. Not at all. She isn’t even Anglican, Pearce?”
“I’m right here. Ask me. No, I’m not Anglican or Catholic. I’m Baptist.”
“Good Lord, Pearce. Perhaps I’d better go and prepare Mama. I don’t know what she’ll say.”
Calum bustled out of the room closing the door behind him.
“This is not going as I had hoped.” Pearce frowned. “This is not the Calum I grew up with. He has changed much in six years.”
“Or you have, Pearce, working for a living in Canada.” “Nonsense, Kate, I am the man I always was. When my aunt comes down leave everything to me. I’ll speak for us.” Kate’s reply was lost as the door opened and an elderly lady erupted into the room.
“What’s all this nonsense Calum is jabbering about? You’ve run off with some kitchen maid? I won’t have it. I tell you, I won’t have it.”
“I’m not a kitchen maid.”
“I didn’t ask you to speak, girl.”
“I’ll speak when I want to.”
The aunt looked open mouthed at Kate. Pearce snorted, threw his hands in the air, and turned his back. “My father was a lay Baptist preacher.”