Anne Bennett - Walking Back to Happiness

This book is written for my mother Eileen Josephine Flanagan and is dedicated to her memory .

Cover

Title Page

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

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Hannah Delaney looked down at her sister, Frances Mullen, and knew she’d never leave her bed again. She felt tears prickle the back of her eyes as she reached for Frances’s yellow, emaciated hand, but she held them back. If Frances could be brave about her impending death, then so could she. ‘You’re a grand girl, Hannah,’ Frances said in little more than a hoarse whisper. ‘Thank you for coming.’

Hannah’s face flushed at the implied reproach. ‘You didn’t bother when I sent for you when my husband, Paddy, was coughing his guts up in the County Hospital,’ Frances might have said.

Hannah knew Frances must have been badly hurt but there had been a desperate reason why she’d not been able to come back when Paddy lay dying and one she could never share with Frances, nor with any of the family. Hannah had told Frances she had the ’flu and wasn’t well enough to travel. She hadn’t even come for the funeral and no one could guess how heartsore she was that she couldn’t come and mourn the man who’d always been more of a father to her than her own and maybe be a measure of support to her sister.

The townsfolk couldn’t understand it at all. ‘People have the ‘flu all the time and get over it,’ they’d said to Frances. ‘Why doesn’t she come for a wee visit now to see how you all are?’

‘Sure, isn’t she rushed off her feet with the fine job she has?’ Frances had answered the criticisms. But inside, she’d ached for the presence of her youngest sister. She’d reared her and had loved her like one of her own, but she seemed to have forgotten all that, for she’d not been near the place for three years.

But now she was here and suddenly to Frances it didn’t matter any more. There was little time to waste on censure and argument and Hannah certainly had no wish to quarrel. She’d always loved Frances dearly and she was saddened that she had such little time left.

‘Why wouldn’t I come?’ she said with a forced smile, giving her sister’s hand a gentle squeeze. ‘Aren’t you the only mother I ever knew and don’t I love you more than anyone in the whole world? If there’s anything I can do for you, you only have to say.’

Frances gave a wry smile and a little sigh. So, she thought, God does answer prayers, some prayers. He couldn’t spare her any longer and God knows at times she was tired enough not to care, but now Josie would be all right. She’d fretted about the child, worried to death that Hannah wouldn’t come, that she wouldn’t be able to ask her.

Frances studied her sister, while she framed the question she had to ask. She wasn’t worried Hannah would refuse. How could she? She’d taken Hannah in when she was just a day old, when their mother had died of childbirth fever. Frances’s third child, Martin, had been only a week old himself and she also had Miriam just fifteen months and Peter coming up to three yet she’d not hesitated to offer Hannah a home. And for that reason Hannah owed her a debt. ‘It’s Josie,’ she said. ‘Will you take Josie? Will you look after her when it’s … when it’s all over?’

‘Josie?’ That dark, secretive, plain child, the one Hannah hardly knew at all for she’d been born after she’d left the farm and always seemed to disappear whenever she’d come for her very occasional visits home.

She’d scarcely ever given the child a thought, for Frances had done what their own mother had done and had a large gap in the family and the nearest in age to Josie was Sam, who at twenty was eleven years her senior. Hannah knew from the letters her sister had written that Sam had been living in the mountains, working their grandparents’ farm since he’d left school at fourteen. If Josie was to go there, she’d become a maid of all work, her childhood would be over and Hannah well knew that.

But for God’s sake, there was a fine family of them. Surely to God one of them could look after their own sister?

But in her heart she knew she was the only one left. Peter had become a priest and was living away in the Scottish Highlands somewhere and poor Miriam was married to a man she had met on a brief visit to England. She returned with him to his home in Connemara where, according to Frances, they tried to scratch a living from the stones. At twenty-eight, she’d been married eight years and had eight children.

Miriam had not come home for her father’s illness or funeral either and gave the excuse she was almost on her time, but Frances had suspected she couldn’t afford to come. Even if she’d have offered a home to Josie, Hannah knew Frances wouldn’t have been happy sending her there.

But then what about Martin who was twenty-seven, the same age as herself, and Siobhan two years younger? Martin had coped with the farm single-handed since his father had died, but Hannah, who’d been brought up alongside him and understood him better than the others, knew he was no farmer. He’d always wanted to go to New York; he used to talk about it all the time. And now he and Siobhan had the chance. Their Aunt Norah had offered to send them the fare.

Martin had been unable to contain his excitement when he’d met Hannah off the train. ‘It’s like a dream,’ he’d said, as he’d set the old pony pulling the cart to canter over the cobblestones. ‘I thought I was stuck on the farm for years, you know, I mean with Da gone? I’d never have left Mammy and God knows I wished no harm to her but … well, the old place won’t be the same without her.’

There was no place in bustling New York and their aunt’s plush apartment for a child either. It hadn’t been said openly, but it was understood.

That left Margaret and Ellen, only Margaret was now known as Sister Ambrose, one of the ‘Sisters of the Poor’. If the war hadn’t raged on for six horrifying years, she would already be in Africa teaching the heathens about the love of Jesus. Now that it was over, she was just awaiting a ship’s return to civilian duties.

Ellen was twenty-one and getting married. But even as Hannah thought of her, she immediately rejected the idea. She was marrying a farmer and would have to live with his parents and two sisters and a brother in a small farmhouse with only two bedrooms. A young sister in tow, too, would make the place even more cramped.

She wondered suddenly where she might have ended up if it hadn’t been for Frances. She might have been pushed from pillar to post, one relative to another. Or left with her morose, sullen father who blamed her for her mother’s death. There was the rub though. Frances had been there, solid, welcoming and loving, and now her dying wish was for Hannah to care for her youngest child.

The trouble was Hannah was marrying Mr Bradley in late summer and she didn’t know how he’d take to her looking after Josie. They’d never talked about children, and she didn’t know how he’d feel being landed with a nine-year-old girl.