Anne Bennett - A Daughter’s Secret

ANNE BENNETT

A Daughter’s Secret

COPYRIGHT

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2008

1

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2007

Copyright © Anne Bennett 2007

Anne Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2008 ISBN: 9780007283576

Version: 2017-09-08

DEDICATION

To my grandson Jake, the eldest Bennett boy, with all my love

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

ONE

As Thomas John Sullivan drove the horse and cart past St Mary’s Catholic church on the way home from Buncrana, the nearest market town, the noon Angelus bell was tolling.

‘Dear Lord, but it’s perishing cold,’ his wife, Biddy, commented from the seat beside him. ‘The fields and hedgerows are still as heavily rimed with frost as they were this morning, for the sun hasn’t put in an appearance all day.’

‘Aye,’ Thomas John agreed, ‘it’s mighty cold, right enough. That’s Donegal for you. Sure, don’t we have the coldest of winters here at times?’

‘We do indeed. Is the child all right, Aggie?’

In the back of the cart, Aggie nursed her little brother, Finn, holding his body tight against her own, her warmest shawl wrapped around the two of them, and yet still he shivered.

‘He is all right,’ she said. ‘Just cold, like the rest of us.’

To divert him, Aggie said, ‘We’ll be home in no time now, and it’s meant to be cold, Finn, for it is nearly Christmas.’ She knew that Finn would know little of Christmas, or Santa Claus either, for he was only just turned eighteen months old. She saw a slight frown pucker his brow as she went on, ‘You’ll like Santa Claus, Finn. He brings good boys and girls presents.’

The child would, she knew, barely know the word ‘present’ either, for the Sullivan children had few of them. There was no money for such frivolities. But for Finn, the youngest, it would be different. Much had been made of him by all the family when he arrived. Aggie knew her mother had bought a few wee things in Buncrana that morning to fill his stocking on Christmas morning and she was looking forward to seeing his face.

‘Aye, nearly Christmas,’ Biddy said. ‘And then the turn of the year – 1898, I wonder what that will bring.’

Thomas John chuckled. ‘What would it bring, woman, but more of the same? Life seldom changes much, except we all get older.’

Aggie thought her father was right, and she was glad. She liked the familiarity of one day following the other predictable and safe. She had been twelve in June, so she had left school and now helped her mother in the home full time. She always looked forward to Saturday morning when she would go to Buncrana with her parents, leaving her brothers Tom and Joe to mind the farm. Her mother would sell their surplus produce in the market, like many other farmers, while Aggie went with her father to buy things needed for the farm. Since Finn’s birth, however, her primary task was to look after him while her parents were busy.

She didn’t mind this in the slightest, for it gave her a chance to meet up with her former classmates, and especially her best friend, Cissie Coghlan.

That day, though, it had been so cold that she had been glad to go home, and she was looking forward to getting into the warm house and out of the wind. When they passed the church she breathed a sigh of relief that they were not that far from home.

Tom and Joe were waiting for them in the yard, having heard the rumble of the cart. Thomas John brought it to a halt in the cobbled yard before the squat whitewashed cottage, scattering the pecking hens as he did so, and alerting the two dogs, who came from the barn barking a greeting.

Tom went forward to take the horse, saying as he did so, ‘I have the water on to boil and the potatoes are in a bucket on the stool inside.’

Biddy nodded and said to Aggie, who was climbing out of the cart with Finn in her arms, ‘Take the wee one inside. This intense cold is too much for him.’

The warmth hit Aggie as she opened the door. The room was dimly lit from the one small window at the end, though the sky looked grey and cloud-laden. But the fire burned brightly in the hearth and she saw that one of the boys, likely Tom, had banked it up with peat. There was a further stack of it the other side of the fireplace. The heavy black pot was heating the water over the fire, held up by one of the hooks of the crane that folded out from the wall.

She carried Finn across the stone-flagged floor and sat him near the warmth on a creepie, a low seat made of bog oak.

‘You sit there, my wee man, and get warm while I start dinner for us all,’ she said, and she was rewarded by a broad smile from Finn as he felt the heat from the fire.

Aggie ladled water from the pot above the fire into a basin, which she then placed on the table, the bucket of potatoes beside her ready for scrubbing. Her mother came in, followed by Joe, carrying parcels. One of these newspaper-wrapped bundles Biddy placed beside Aggie: she knew what was in it and that was fish that her father had bought from the fleet at Buncrana harbour.

Later, with the scrubbed potatoes boiling in their jackets in the big pot, and the plates taken from the dresser and put on to the side of the hearth to warm, Aggie helped her mother prepare the fish for frying, first, chopping off their heads and then slicing through each one expertly to remove the bone, as she had been taught from a child.

It was as the family was halfway through the meal and their hunger somewhat eased that Aggie said, ‘Me and Cissie were talking to Mr McAllister today.’