My third historic novel is coming out soon. It’s another story set in Southampton, this time in Northam Street. In the summer of 1931, helping a neighbour unleashes a chain of events that threatens to tear the close-knit but impoverished Northam Street community apart. Daisy is convinced death is coming for someone. Will it be Jacob’s wife, Annie, or the women who have spirited her away — Nancy, the prostitute, Mabel, the handywoman or Daisy herself? Albie believes Jacob’s war wounds are behind his strange behaviour. The neighbours think he’s dangerous. If Albie can’t persuade them that Jacob poses no threat, somebody will get badly hurt. Sam’s unrequited love for Nancy is the least of his problems. He thinks he has escaped his troubled past until someone starts attacking women down by the docks. Then fingers point at him. ~ Read on for a sneak peek at chapter one . . .
1 – Wednesday 8 July 1931
The day had trouble written all over it — what kind of trouble, Daisy couldn’t tell. While she hunched over the big white sink peeling potatoes, she stared through the grimy window into the back yard. An ominous heaviness hung in the air, as if a storm was gathering, although the little bit of sky she could see was bright blue. Lily said Mum used to have visions too, except she called them premonitions. She said it was because Mum was the seventh daughter, and being Mum’s seventh daughter, Daisy was bound to have them. People called her a witch, but the odd forewarning and a knack for reading people wasn’t magic. Anyone could do it if they bothered to look at what was in front of their eyes. Instead, they talked on and on when they had nothing to say. If she could do magic, she wouldn’t be living hand to mouth in this tumbledown terraced house with her husband, her sister and the man who had been her father before his mind deserted him.
The frantic banging on the front door told her that whatever was coming was outside on the step.
Lily gave Daisy a puzzled look and walked down the dark hallway, grumbling, ‘All right, I’m coming. No need to break the door down.’
Being the fifth daughter, Lily didn’t have visions. Like Daisy, she had raven black hair and wide eyes that couldn’t decide if they wanted to be brown or green, but she was a talker, not a seer. When she returned with Isobel and Nancy, Daisy could see the direction her bad feeling was taking.
‘Mum’s not answering the door.’ Isobel’s big brown eyes were full of fear and tears. ‘She wouldn’t have gone out. She knows I always visit on half-day closing. He’s hurt her again, I know it.’
She pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket, loudly blew her beaky nose and began to cry in earnest. She was sixteen, but her untidily plaited brown hair and the tears spilling from her eyes made her look childlike.
While Isobel was talking, Nancy, a tall, thin thing with a hard face and a flat chest, stood awkwardly on the cracked linoleum, and ignored Lily’s disgusted looks. Lily made no secret of her dislike for Nancy Blythe, just as Nancy made no secret of selling her body for a living. Lily thought living next-door-but-one to a prostitute lowered the tone of the place. As if it could get much lower than these dilapidated houses with doors opening onto the street and privies in the filthy yards.
Now Nancy took up the story. ‘Jacob was banging on my door on Saturday night, drunk as usual. As if I’d have him as a customer after last time. He’s too violent when he’s been drinking.’ She gave Isobel an apologetic look as if she wasn’t aware what her father was like after a few drinks. ‘Anyway, there was a hell of a racket in his house. I haven’t heard hide nor hair from Annie since. I didn’t even see her put the washing out on Monday.’
‘She’s hardly the noisy type, is she?’ Lily curled her lip. ‘And I doubt she’d have much truck with your kind.’
‘She’s not my best friend, but we share a wall between our houses, and, unlike some people, she’s always polite to me.’ Nancy looked down her long straight nose at Lily. The harshness of her high cheekbones and boyishly short brown hair was balanced by a long fringe, swept to one side and curled seductively across her cheek. She brushed it impatiently out of her eye.
‘Have you tried the back door?’ Daisy asked.
The unease she’d felt all morning was now a pricking foreboding. She looked hard at Nancy and saw an undercurrent of alarm beneath her bluff and bravado. She’d never knock on their door without good reason, any more than she’d give up the chance of Jacob’s money if she had a choice.
Nancy bit her lip. ‘To be honest, I was scared. That’s why I knocked on your door. The way Jacob was carrying on, on Saturday night . . .’
‘He’s done for her this time.’ Isobel blew her nose again. ‘I know it.’
With solemn faces, they all trooped out of the back door onto the uneven flagstones of the grim yard. A few rotten fences and disintegrating walls stood between the back-to-back privies and the high wall of the terrace behind. Despite these, there was no privacy and very little to stop anyone walking from one end to the other through the gaps. The houses were a hotchpotch of mismatched windows and doors, worn steps and washing lines. The women stepped over the remains of what had once been a wall, stopped outside Annie’s door and looked nervously at each other. Daisy took charge. She climbed the steps and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. The people of Northam Street had nothing worth stealing, so they didn’t generally lock their doors. Daisy took a deep breath, turned the handle and pushed the door open.
The kitchen was gloomy, with a big wooden table, three worm-eaten ladder-back chairs and a battered cabinet, with one door hanging off. Annie was on the floor, a deathly pale bag of bones with a crooked beak of a nose and limp hair like a moth-eaten blackbird’s wing. Daisy knelt beside her and felt for a pulse, it was weak, but she was alive.
‘Go and get her some water.’ Daisy turned to Isobel, who cried even harder.
While Isobel found a glass and went outside to the tap, Daisy gently raised Annie’s head and rested it on her knees. Smoothing back the hair from her forehead revealed purple bruises on the side of her cheek and around her neck. It looked as if someone had grabbed her throat. Obviously, that someone was Jacob. Who else could it be?
Finally, Annie’s eyelids fluttered. She struggled to sit up and pulled up her collar to cover the marks. Then Isobel came back with the water, and Daisy made Annie take a few sips.
‘You don’t need to make all this fuss.’ Annie stared at the four concerned women watching her. ‘It was a stupid fall, nothing more. I missed my footing going down the back steps to the privy and took a tumble. Nothing’s broken. You know what I’m like, Isobel, always tripping over things.’
Daisy saw the lie. The bruises told the tale.
Lily didn’t see it or chose to ignore it. ‘Do you need to see the optician? Mum’s eyes started to go when she was approaching forty. She was always banging into things and tripping over before she got her glasses, wasn’t she Daisy?’
Daisy said nothing — she had been eight when Mum died, so she barely remembered her. Her six sisters had brought her up.
‘I’m only thirty-seven,’ Annie said with a weak smile. ‘I’ve always been clumsy.’
‘Those bruises didn’t happen today.’ Daisy pointed out.
‘No.’ Annie lowered her huge dark eyes. ‘I fell on Sunday night. This morning I was getting the laudanum from the back of the cupboard when I fell again.’ She held up a small brown bottle.
‘That’s an awful lot of falling,’ Daisy said.
The way Annie sat, slightly twisted to the right with her shoulder stiff and her arm clasped to her chest, said it wasn’t only her face that was bruised. Jacob had given her a right battering by the looks of it. People thought he was a nice chap. He’d had a tough life, fought at Gallipoli and Ypres, been wounded and gone back to work at the docks without a word of complaint. Like most of the men in Northam Street, he worked hard and drank hard too. Daisy saw bad things in Jacob’s head, though — evil things, and darkness, like a shadow following him. She was sure he had a nasty end ahead of him.
‘It might have been a faint.’ Annie stared at her hands. ‘My head was aching, and I’d had no breakfast. Just help me up, and I’ll take the laudanum and be as right as rain.’
‘I don’t think you should.’ The bottle in Annie’s hand screamed danger to Daisy, as sure as if it had had the word poison in big red letters. ‘Let me make you a mixture instead, willow bark for the pain, daisy and elder-leaf ointment for your bruises and some raspberry leaf tea for the child.’
‘Child?’ Annie stared up at her blankly.
‘The child you’re carrying, the one you need to protect from any more accidents.’ Daisy raised an eyebrow. How could Annie not know when it was so clear to see?
‘A baby?’ Lily said. ‘In that case, you should listen to Daisy and put that laudanum bottle in the back of the cupboard. Give this one the best chance you can, eh?’
‘There is no baby.’ Annie shook her head.
‘You might be able to fool yourself, but you can’t fool me,’ Daisy said. ‘I’d say it’s due Christmas time, about a month after mine.’
With a disbelieving shake of her head and a helping hand from Isobel, Annie got slowly to her feet. Lily pulled out a chair, then took Annie’s arm and guided her to it.
‘Go and get Mabel.’ Daisy turned to Nancy, still by the back door gnawing on her fingernails anxiously.
Annie protested, but Nancy went anyway.
When Mabel arrived, she was carrying the tools of her trade in a black leather bag. Her gaunt face was calm, but the vertical line between her brows showed her concern. She pushed a strand of greying hair out of her eyes and shooed the women out into the yard. ‘Let her have some privacy while I examine her.’
After what seemed like hours but must have been minutes, Mabel called them back into the kitchen.
‘She is pregnant,’ she said. ‘But she won’t be much longer if Jacob keeps beating her like this. It’s shameful what he’s done to her.’
‘It was my fault,’ Annie said. ‘I fell asleep and let the dinner burn. I was tired, but he’s entitled to expect —’
‘He isn’t entitled to beat you black and blue, Annie.’ Mabel shoved things back into her bag angrily. ‘If he keeps doing it, you will lose this baby, like all the others.’
‘He doesn’t mean to hurt me. It was my fault. If I hadn’t fallen asleep — He was so sorry afterwards. He forgets himself sometimes, that’s all.’
‘You can make all the excuses you like for him, but how many babies are you prepared to lose, Annie? I’m surprised you managed to carry Isobel to term.’ Mabel shook her head sadly.
‘He wasn’t like that then.’ Annie looked pleadingly at Isobel, then quickly looked away. ‘It’s because of the war — he had pieces of another man’s skull blown into his head. Can you imagine what it must have been like? He was in the hospital for over a year, and he could scarcely remember who he was. He still has the most horrific dreams and wakes up screaming. It’s the drink and those dreams that make him like it. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s always so sorry afterwards and so gentle. It’s almost worth it to see him like he used to be. If I could stop him drinking and having the dreams —’
‘If you stay here with him, it won’t only be another baby he kills.’ Daisy took Annie’s hand. ‘It will be you too, and then he’ll hang. Is that what you want?’‘
Of course not, I love him, and he needs me. Anyway, how could I leave him? Where would I go?’
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