THE JARROW TRILOGY: all 3 enthralling sagas in 1 volume; The Jarrow Lass, A Child of Jarrow & Return to Jarrow by Janet MacLeod Trotter

Author:Janet MacLeod Trotter
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Victorian Britain, strong women, set on Tyneside, Catherine Cookson, illegitimacy, tragic love story, family drama
Publisher: MacLeod Trotter Books
Published: 2012-05-11T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 28

As the dreary weeks of January and February dragged on, Kate existed in a strange limbo. To the prying world beyond the doorstep, she was home to help Rose, who was having a bad spell with her legs and chest. To her family she was an embarrassment, the source of which was never referred to. Her mother was distant, Jack was wary. As her belly grew, he would sneak her bashful sidelong glances, half fascinated, half appalled. Any lingering playfulness between them had vanished in the shock of her pregnancy and its aftermath. Where once he had looked up to Kate and followed her around like a loyal puppy, she now turned to him for protection.

At fifteen he was tall and brawny, already hardened by a year grafting on the dockside, and he had shown he could stand up to his father’s bullying. He had not done so since, but this did not stop John punching him and ridiculing him for defending his ‘fallen’ sister. Jack would stand his ground and fend off John’s fists, which only infuriated his father more.

But most of John’s drunken goading was aimed at Kate. After a couple of hours in the pub, he would stagger in, filthy and sodden from labouring waist-deep in river water unloading iron ore, and begin his taunting.

‘Fetch me some’at to eat, slut. Tak off me wet boots and troosers - should be used to that,’ he would laugh crudely. ‘Did that for yer gentleman, did you?’ When she ignored him, he would jab her belly and curse her for her shamelessness.

The foul-mouthed ridicule and threats to tell Father O’Neill, the local firebrand priest, were unremitting. Occasionally, Jack, fuelled with swigs from his father’s jug of whisky, would spark back.

‘Father O’Neill wouldn’t know you if he passed you in the street,’ he muttered on one occasion.

‘What’s that?’ John demanded, not hearing the jibe.

‘Nowt.’

‘I’ll give you nowt!’ John bawled, slapping him round the head, and the fighting would start again.

Later Rose would scold Kate for these attacks. ‘Look at the trouble you cause our Jack.’ But Kate could do nothing to stop their sparring, or John’s relentless criticism.

Ahead stretched a bleak future for Kate at Leam Lane, forever at the beck and call of her ageing parents, forever in their debt. In the quiet of the night, miserable and angry, trying to get comfortable on the hard wooden settle that had become her bed, she gave in to tears.

At twenty-three, her life was in ruins. Nothing could save her now, except Alexander. Alternately, she agonised about what might have happened to him and railed at his abandonment of her. What if something terrible had happened? He had been taken ill again, had bled to death? He had gone down at sea in a storm? But there had been no rumours of a tragedy circulating at the inn. Never in all these months had she had one word from him.

It pained her to remember, but the only reason he

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