Child on the Doorstep. Anne Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ share this with Angela. He knew she was no fool and would know how seriously ill Mary was without having it spelt out for her.

      Angela did know, and as the days unfolded she couldn’t believe how Mary was hanging on. December wasn’t very old when she fought off the debilitating fever, and the hacking cough that had once seemed to shake every bone in her body eased a little, as did her sore throat, so that she was able to swallow the broths Angela soon made ready for her. As the worst effects of the chest infection left her, strangely her mind seemed more lucid than it had been for many months and one day she said to Angela, ‘You should be at work.’

      ‘Work will keep,’ Angela said. ‘They’re coping without me just now.’

      ‘Maybe they will find they can cope without you permanently.’

      Angela smiled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have no fears on that score. They knew my place was with you when you were so ill. I am delighted to see you so much better. Sometimes I wished I could have breathed for you.’

      Mary gave a wry smile. ‘If I had thought of that, I might have wished you could too,’ she said and then she added, ‘Christmas is always a bad time for you, isn’t it?’

      ‘Of course it is.’

      ‘Connie has noticed.’

      ‘I can’t help that,’ Angela said.

      ‘I told her it’s because you still miss her daddy and you feel it more at Christmas,’ Mary said.

      ‘Well, you didn’t tell a lie anyway,’ Angela said. ‘I do miss Barry. Every day I miss him, but I go on because I must, but what I did nine years ago, God, it eats away at me, Mammy. God may forgive me, but I will never forgive myself. I condemned my own child to misery and deprivation and it doesn’t help that at the time there was no alternative and there still isn’t. I sacrificed my own child, my baby, so that others wouldn’t be hurt, and all I could give her was the locket that they probably won’t let her keep. They might have even stolen it from her.’

      Angela wasn’t aware of when she began to cry. Mary hadn’t the strength to put her arms around Angela as she wanted to and so she contented herself with patting her hand. And eventually Angela went on, ‘I’ve never confessed, you know, Mammy. It was the worst thing I have ever done in my life and I could not bring myself to tell any priest. I asked God to punish me and He took Barry from me. When I saw you collapsed on the floor with the telegram in your hand I thought He had taken you too. Oh God, that would have been a heavy price to pay.’

      ‘Oh my darling girl,’ Mary said, her voice breaking with emotion. ‘I don’t know if God does things like that, but you really need to get absolution for your own sake.’

      ‘Mammy, I can’t,’ Angela protested. ‘Can you imagine what would happen if I did that? I know Father Brannigan can’t tell anyone what I say in confession, but that won’t stop him berating me, for he knows my voice. He will know the identity of the person the other side of that grille telling him of the dreadful, heinous thing I did and why, and that would be hard to bear. And what if someone overheard what I said in the confessional box, or heard him telling me off later and put two and two together? No, Mammy, I am not going down that road.’

      ‘How about St Chad’s? No one knows you there.’

      Angela thought of the kindly looking priest that she knew people called Father John at St Chad’s, the same man who had unknowingly protected her that dreadful Christmas Eve nine years before.

      ‘I couldn’t,’ she said.

      ‘Why not?’ Mary demanded. ‘That night, I know you took shelter there, but did he see you go into the church?’

      Angela shook her head. ‘I doubt it. I mean, he didn’t seem to be in the main body of the church when I went in. I only saw him when the men from the house came looking for me. They admitted to him they hadn’t seen me go in either, but they were checking everywhere because it was as if I had disappeared into thin air. Anyway, he sent them packing and if he had seen me come in in the agitated state I was in, I’m sure he would have spoken to me. I mean, the church wasn’t empty as I told you, but it wasn’t full like it is for Mass. There were only a handful of people there and, thinking about it, he probably knew most of them.’

      ‘So why won’t you go there? You said he looked kindly.’

      ‘I have heard he’s kind,’ Angela said. ‘But I might make him feel a bit of a fool, because I’d say he’d work out who I was, because I’ll have to tell him everything if I want him to give me absolution. How could I tell a man, any man, never mind a priest, about that attack?’

      ‘Angela, you cannot blame yourself,’ Mary said. ‘None of it was your fault.’

      ‘D’you know, Mammy,’ Angela said rather sadly. ‘In the general scheme of things it hardly seems to matter whose fault it was.’

      ‘God knows, and that’s the truth,’ Mary said.

      ‘You know, when Barry died, I thought about enquiring after the child, or even bringing her here where she belongs to be brought up by her mother.’

      ‘What stopped you?’

      ‘Well it isn’t done, is it?’ Angela said. ‘I mean, if you want a child or a baby, you go to an orphanage, but no one adopts a foundling from the workhouse. I’ve something to tell you, Mary. A few years ago, the pain and the anguish of not knowing what happened to my little girl was so immense, I couldn’t bear it. I was so wracked with the thought that she had died or was being cruelly treated, I was tearing my hair out with the worry of it all.’

      ‘So what did you do?’ asked Mary. She could see that Angela had a burden to unload and waited patiently for the woman she considered her daughter to speak.

      ‘It was so bad that I went to the workhouse and asked about a young child who had been left there some years before. I pretended that I was making enquiries for a friend.’

      ‘What did they tell you?’ asked Mary, who couldn’t believe that Angela had taken such a step. Though she realised that such a loving person as her daughter would leave no stone unturned once her heart was decided on such a course of action.

      Angela’s face took on a distressed aspect as she told Mary what had occurred.

      ‘A hard-faced woman opened the door and wouldn’t let me over the threshold. I tried to explain about the child and the locket but she refused to listen to me. Just said that once the children had come into the workhouse any family left had handed over control and they belonged to the workhouse now. Oh Mary, it was awful, she told me to forget about the child, it was no concern of my friend’s now, and then slammed the door in my face. I felt sick, knowing that my child could be behind those walls. I’ll never know what happened to her now – if she is safe, if she lived or died or if a friendly hand ever held hers when she was sad or lonely.’

      Angela was in tears again now and Mary reached out to comfort her. ‘She is in God’s hands, Angela, and we must pray that He is her comfort as He must be ours.’

      ‘Perhaps it is just as well as it would have opened a can of worms, wouldn’t it? Eventually they would have tumbled to it that I was the child’s mother and then everyone would know and the child’s life could be blighted even further by the taint of sin. And how would Connie cope then, knowing the truth of it all?’

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