Alone Beneath The Heaven by Rita Bradshaw Read Free Book Online

all right, me bairn, it’s all right.’
     
    Maggie lumbered off the next bed as quickly as her bulk, and the dose of laudanum she had taken earlier, would allow, and bent over the small girl who had raised herself slightly on her elbows. ‘You settle back down, there’s a good lass. I’ll give you somethin’ to help you sleep, eh?’
     
    ‘Where . . . where is he?’
     
    ‘Who, hinny?’
     
    ‘The doctor with the smiley voice,’ Sarah said weakly.
     
    ‘Dr Mallard? You mean Dr Mallard, he’s replacin’ old March an’ not afore time—’
     
    ‘Where is he?’ There was a fretful note in Sarah’s voice now and Maggie’s hand came to the child’s brow which she found to be over-warm.
     
    ‘He’s gone, but don’t fret yourself, he’ll be back in the mornin’. Now, you have a dose of this an’ it’ll make you feel better.’
     
    ‘I don’t want it.’
     
    ‘Dr Mallard said for you to have it.’ Maggie was nothing if not crafty, and when Sarah took the bitter-tasting mixture without further remonstration she added, ‘There’s a good lassie. The doctor’ll be pleased with you when he comes, now won’t he, takin’ all your medicine.’
     
    ‘Where’s . . . where’s Matron?’
     
    Maggie followed Sarah’s train of thought and said, matter-of-factly and without expression, ‘The doctor said for her to keep away, don’t you remember? An’ I’m stayin’ with you till you’re better, all right?’ She didn’t add the doctor had said he would make it his business to see Matron was dealt with. Somehow she couldn’t quite believe herself he would win that particular battle.
     
    ‘My mam didn’t want me, did she.’ It was a statement, not a question, and followed with, ‘I hate her.’
     
    ‘Now, now, hinny.’
     
    ‘I do.’ The beautiful picture she had drawn in her mind was gone, torn away with each lash of the cane, and it was this more than anything else that was causing the grinding pain inside her head. Now there was nothing except real life, and the awareness was almost too much to bear.
     
    With a wisdom born of her roots, Maggie didn’t try to shift the conversation to more comfortable ground or offer platitudes. The doctor had been right, it wasn’t Sarah’s physical state that was at risk, so now she said, ‘You don’t know your mam didn’t want you, hinny, just that she couldn’t keep you an’ that’s quite different. There were times when I was near givin’ away my William after his da had died, an’ that for his sake, not mine, I might add. Your mam probably thought she was doin’ right by you.’
     
    ‘You didn’t give him away though, did you?’
     
    ‘No, lass, I didn’t, but he might be alive now if I had, ’stead of which the fever took him when he was barely seven years old.’
     
    ‘I wish my mam had kept me and I’d died,’ Sarah said dully, her tongue feeling too big for her mouth. ‘I do.’
     
    ‘Lass, all things pass.’ Maggie sat herself down on the edge of the narrow iron bed, and carefully drew Sarah against her copious bosom, rocking her gently as they both became quiet. She continued long after she knew the child was asleep, her chin sunk into the folds of her neck and her eyes wide open.
     
    What would become of this fierce little individual whom she loved like her own? It was a thought that had come more and more often of late, along with a sense of unease only the dulling effects of the laudanum could ease.
     
    Sarah was too bright, too beautiful. She didn’t fit into the mould the world demanded of its working class, and it was this very thing that had grated on Florrie from the moment she set eyes on the lass. The world could be unforgiving, oh aye, it could that, and not just with the likes of Sarah either. Look at the poor King, or Duke of Windsor as he was called now. All he’d wanted to do was to marry the woman he loved, and he’d lost his crown because of it. What had she read he’d said when he