House of Angels Read Online Free Page B

lively chatter, herlaughter, and Florrie’s cheery certainty that tomorrow, or the day after that, things would get better.
    But Mercy knew things could only get worse now that she was alone. And how she would find the rent each week, let alone food to fill her young belly, was still a mystery to her. She’d have starved already if it hadn’t been for Jessie and her family.
    There was talk of change in the neighbourhood, of buildings being threatened with demolition. ‘Slum clearance’, they called it. A proud town like Kendal didn’t much care to have any part of it described in such a way, although finding the money to make the necessary improvements always took second place to the needs of the wealthy, to men like Josiah Angel, who ran this town. It could be years before they ever got round to the task.
    Little, in fact, had altered in the district over the last two centuries beyond some necessary attention given to the sewers and water supply, which had originally come from the Tea Well at the top of Fountain Brow, and had been closed almost half a century ago because of the risk of typhoid. Overall there still hung the sweet-sour stink of mouldy decay, shared privies, household refuse, and the waste and sweat of too many bodies crowded into too few dwellings.
    Old women still sat on stools at their doors while barefooted children played hoop-la or marbles in the filth of the gutters, if they were fortunate enough to own such treasures and not otherwise employed helping to work the hand-loom, or run errands for their mothers. Yet despite this evidence of a close-knit community whereloyalties were strong and everyone knew the business of their neighbours, it was not a place to linger, nor one in which to risk taking short cuts unless you were sure of your bearings.
    Mercy ventured out only to buy a few essentials. She kept herself very much to herself, wrapped in a private world of grief. She missed her mother desperately, and, despite her good intentions, would often waste hours each day just lying on her bed weeping. She might never have found the courage to carry on at all had it not been for Jessie. It was the older woman who had gently bullied her into working again by fetching her the yarn. She’d remind her to eat, insist she wash her face, even comb her tangled curls. And when the day’s shift was done, she’d fetch her up a bit of warm dinner on a plate.
    Jessie Flint was a large woman with breasts like cushions that shook when she laughed, which she did surprisingly often. She had smooth white hair fastened in a knot at her nape, and dark watchful eyes, few teeth, but plenty of grit in her soul. She was the mother of nine children, all of whom seemed to have miraculously survived, no doubt due to the canny ingenuity their mother instilled in each and every one of them. They were all of them streetwise, never missing a chance to earn an easy penny, whether by holding a gentleman’s horse or sneaking off with his purse. Jessie’s view of right and wrong was tempered by the necessity to earn a crust, if not always an honest one – the needs of her precious brood coming well above any fancy law devised by the rich and the blessed.
    The Flint family made their living out of weaving, andfrom knitting stockings, the younger ones knitting in the thumbs. Jessie had readily passed on all she knew to Florrie when she’d first come to Fellside. Like her mother before her, from whom Jessie had learnt these skills, she would stand at her door in her old coal-scuttle bonnet, swaying or ‘swaving’ as the knitters called it, moving gently with the rhythm of her knitting sticks. There were few knitters left in Kendal now, the trade almost gone, but Jessie clung on to the old ways because she loved the work, and needed every penny she could earn.
    Mercy didn’t know how she would have coped without her friend, or Jessie’s eldest son, Jack, who was yet again urging her to carry out her mother’s last