The Cuckoo's Child Read Online Free Page B

throw over her knees, and shouted, ‘’Ey-up, Jinny!’
    It was not long before she found those agreeable first impressions of her new surroundings were to be distinctly reversed. Scarcely was the town centre left before – hey presto, the trap was being driven straight into just the sort of heavily industrialized area she had expected, but was still not properly prepared for. Truly, as they drew deeper into it, she began to feel as though she had been plunged into another world. A pall of smoke and vapour mingled powerfully with another, unidentifiable, disagreeably rancid odour. Engineering works, textile machinery factories, dye houses and all manner of other concerns ancillary to the woollen trade jostled with warehouses and corner shops, but overriding everything else were the towering mills – one every few yards along the road, it seemed. Square, fortress-like, many-storeyed and built of soot-blackened stone, they loomed over narrow rows and terraces of little grey houses, darkened with the same grime. A noxious river, the Neller, flowed alongside the road, beside that the canal, and every mill had its big iron gates bearing their name – telling the world they belonged to Bamforths, Hardcastles, Shawcrosses, a litany of repeated names. Each had its own tall, tapering chimney stack, no doubt meant to send the thick belching clouds of smoke and soot issuing from it above the tops of the surrounding hills, though the intention had not been conspicuously successful.
    Every now and again flat, tarpaulin-covered wagons harnessed to teams of huge stamping draft-horses pulled in and out of mill gates in front of them, forcing them to stop, the carts’ iron-shod wheels grinding on the stony road surface. Top-heavy with enormous loads of big, square bales of greasy wool, their passing left little doubt as to where that odour had come from. Dyers and spinners, the mills proclaimed themselves, weavers, fullers, woolcombers, shoddy and mungo manufacturers . . . shoddy ? And what could mungo be? she asked Sugden.
    â€˜Devil’s dust,’ he replied grimly, but did not choose to elaborate and went on puffing away at his evil pipe, not appreciably improving the atmosphere. Laura bit her lip, vowed to keep her own silence thereafter and lapsed into her thoughts, with only the jingle of metal, the creak of leather and the rhythmic impact of the little mare’s hooves to keep them company.
    As the distance lengthened the Neller valley narrowed, and the rolling hills either side soared ever more steeply up to the bleak moors on top. Small mill towns climbed the hillsides at an angle of forty-five degrees, where pinafored women hung out washing on lines strung across the streets, wearing clogs and woollen shawls wrapped over their heads, fastened under the chin with a safety pin. By now, Laura would have been glad of the fur-lined cape Lillian had insisted she packed. Forgetting her vow of silence, she asked, shivering, ‘Is it always so cold up here?’
    â€˜Cold? Nay, it’s nobbut fresh today. Wait till winter!’ Laura pushed her gloved hands further under the rug on her knees, seeking warmth, very glad indeed that she would not be here by the time winter arrived. Relenting, Sugden added, pointing ahead with his whip, ‘Nearly there, any road. Yon’s Wainthorpe.’
    It was suddenly upon them, another steep little town, grey rows of back-to-back terrace houses, one above the other, like the rungs of a ladder. The main road ran in a curve here along the floor of the valley, past shops and public houses and a Co-op, with dark alleys and less than salubrious streets in between; a church and at least two chapels, a little market square. Mill machinery hummed and clattered, carts rumbled on the stone setts.
    Sugden again pointed with his whip. ‘Beaumont’s.’
    They had reached a humped bridge over the river, as polluted here with the discharge of dye