The Orphan Collection Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Books

  About the Author

  Also by Maggie Hope

  Title Page

  Orphan Girl

  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

  Chapter Thirty

  Workhouse Child

  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

  Chapter Thirty

  An Orphan’s Secret

  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

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Books

  Orphan Girl

  She’s no more than an unpaid servant…

  Lorinda is only a child when tragedy deprives her of her true family. Sent to live with her aunt in her boarding house, she grows up desperately craving affection.

  Finally she sees a chance to escape her drab surroundings and unkind family. But it will mean sacrificing true love and accepting a marriage of convenience…

  Workhouse Child

  All she wants is a family of her own…

  Lottie is just three years old when her Mammy dies and she is sent to the workhouse. A childhood spent in poverty, skivvying for other people, leaves her with no prospects, no family…

  Yet Lottie is bright and has ambitions for a better life. And when an opportunity arises at the local Chapel, Lottie seizes her chance. But will she ever be anything more than a workhouse child?

  An Orphan’s Secret

  Life is a long, tough struggle for Meg Maddison…

  Growing up caring for her brothers after the death of their mother, it is only her indomitable spirit that gets her through the hard times. And when she marries and starts a family of her own, it seems as if the hardships are over.

  But the return of a darkly menacing figure from her past threatens to destroy all she has fought for…

  About the Author

  Maggie Hope was born and raised in County Durham. She worked as a nurse for many years, before giving up her career to raise her family.

  Also by Maggie Hope

  A Wartime Nurse

  A Mother’s Gift

  A Nurse’s Duty

  A Daughter’s Gift

  Molly’s War

  The Servant Girl

  A Daughter’s Duty

  Like Mother, Like Daughter

  Eliza’s Child

  The Miner’s Girl

  The Orphan Collection

  Maggie Hope

  Chapter One

  ‘You’ll blooming well do what I say or you can get yourself up to the workhouse! Oaklands, that’s where the other little bastards are! You impittent little basket, you’re not going to turn out like your mother, not if I have the bringing up of ye!’

  The hard, blue eyes of Auntie Doris Parker bored into Lorinda Leigh’s uncomprehending head. Lorinda looked round the kitchen of the old terraced house: she looked at the table and chairs, scrubbed white with soda water daily: she looked at the piles of dishes waiting to be washed in the brownstone sink in the corner, then down at the stone-flagged floor which was sending icicles of cold shafting up through the thin leather of her boots.

  What did Auntie Doris mean, she wondered through her misery, by the workhouse? Wasn’t this a workhouse? Lorinda pushed the thought to the back of her mind. First of all she had to deal with the insult to her mother: she wasn’t going to let anyone get away with talking like that about her mam.

  ‘My mother was a good woman! Me grannie said so!’ Lorinda lifted her chin and stared fearlessly up at her aunt. ‘She was taken down, that’s what me grannie said!’

  ‘Taken down, eh?’ Auntie Doris grinned in jeering amusement and Lorinda hated her. Her small fists doubled up at her sides. ‘They all say that, don’t they?’ Auntie Doris continued. ‘But they don’t all go gallivanting off to London and leaving their by-blows to God and Providence!’ She glared down at the little girl, seeing the stricken look in the violet eyes, eyes which seemed too big for the thin, pale face. Long, black lashes lay over the white cheeks, hair just as dark curled over her shoulders. Doris Parker turned away and Lorinda was bewildered by the anger in her eyes. She watched dumbly as her aunt hung the apron on a hook behind the back door and took down her old black jacket, her shopping jacket.

  ‘Just you get on with the washing-up!’ Auntie Doris snapped. ‘I’ve wasted enough time fetching you all the way from Durham and it’s a scandal, the fares, a shilling and threepence for a little mite like you. Eight blooming miles, that’s all it is from Durham to Bishop Auckland! And the station a mile from the market place. Eeh, well, I’ve the shopping to do and a meal to make before the ironworks turns out. Now, just you make sure it’s all done by the time I get back.’ She pinned on an enormous, black straw hat over her thin, grey hair and, picking up her basket from the table, swept out of the back door and down the brick-paved yard.

  Lorinda stared after her stolid form as Doris turned into Finkle Street. The girl thrust out her chin mutinously though her heart felt like a lead weight and tears were close. Sighing, she pulled a stool up to the sink and climbed onto it. She jumped as the
door opened again and Auntie Doris poked her head round it.

  ‘An’ another thing, I’m not having such a daft name as Lorinda in my house. Lorinda, indeed! I’ll call you Ada like your mother, she never liked it but I think it’s good enough, a nice, down-to-earth name. Yes. You’ll be Ada from now on.’ Banging the door decisively behind her, she went on her way to the Co-op, the Store as everyone called it. So she didn’t see or hear Ada’s protest.

  Ada! What was wrong with Lorinda? Her grannie had told her she was named for her great-aunt, it was a family name and Auntie Doris knew it. But now Lorinda was to be Ada. Her cup of misery was full to overflowing. Blindly she put her mind to the washing-up.

  Carefully she carried a ladle can half-full of hot water, steaming hot from the boiler, by the side of the black-leaded range, and poured it into the enamel bowl, going back for another as a full can was too heavy for her. Being so short, she had some difficulty in reaching the bowl but she managed it without mishap. Grating hard, white soap with a handful of washing soda, she made a lather, just as her grannie had taught her. She began to wash the plates, steadfastly refusing to think about her grannie.

  She looked up at the dingy, green-painted dado on the walls with the light-green distemper above it. Somehow the walls made her think of Durham Gaol, so bleak and forbidding when she walked past it with her grannie. There now! And she wasn’t going to think about her grannie. Lorinda plunged her thin wrists and hands into the steaming water, wincing as the soda burned into a cut on her little finger. She had done that with the bread knife, when her grannie had first been taken bad. Lorinda had tried to tempt her appetite with bread and milk broily but it wasn’t any good, grannie couldn’t eat anything. And now … Lorinda concentrated on the plates, rubbing hard with the mop to get off the traces of congealed porridge, using her thumbnail for the stubborn bits. In spite of her resolve, memories kept intruding into her thoughts, causing her to sniff back the tears.

  Lorinda’s heart burned as she remembered Auntie Doris’s sneering reference to her mother, who was, after all, Auntie Doris’s own sister. Lorinda couldn’t remember her mother at all; she could remember nothing before living in the little house in Durham City with her grannie. But Grannie would talk to her about her mam, telling her how she had gone south so that she could earn good money and be able to send for her daughter as soon as she could.

  ‘We were all right,’ Lorinda said aloud, talking to the plate in her hand. ‘Me and Grannie were all right.’ That’s what Grannie always said. Grannie never made Lorinda feel she was a burden, not like Auntie Doris did.

  ‘We’re all right,’ Grannie would say. ‘I’ve got me bit of charring for the students up at the university. And I can always take in washing. A good washerwoman I am. And you’re such a help to me, Lorinda. Your mam will send some money soon, you’ll see; till then we’ll manage.’

  But me mam didn’t send money home for us, Lorinda thought. And she didn’t send for me or come back for me. Lorinda picked up a pint pot and scoured it with the mop. She had been sure that when the new century came her mam would come home. Everyone said that things would get better in the new century and Lorinda had looked forward to it eagerly. It was a bright promise, the new century.

  But it was 1901 already and Lorinda was seven and a half years old and still her mam hadn’t come for her. By now, her mam was like a character in a fairy story to Lorinda. She didn’t come, not even when Grannie took to her bed and Mrs Armstrong came in from next door but one, and Grannie had to go to the fever hospital and Lorinda wasn’t allowed to see her for fear of the fever. Then there was the awful day that Grannie died and Auntie Doris Parker came, trailing Uncle Harry, bustling in and taking over the house and Lorinda.

  Lorinda was lifted up to see her grannie in the coffin but it wasn’t really Grannie, her grannie was gone. So she had to go too, with Auntie Doris and Uncle Harry with his sandy moustache and shiny, wet lips. He didn’t say anything at all to her, simply looked at her and at Auntie Doris and then back at Lorinda.

  ‘There’s no help for it, Harry, we’ll have to take her in.’

  Auntie Doris was firm. There was only one boss in their house and it wasn’t Uncle Harry, that was what Grannie used to say. ‘Though why we should have to, I don’t know,’ Auntie Doris continued in an aggrieved tone of voice. They were picking over Grannie’s things at the time to see if there was anything worth saving. ‘Her mother should come for her really.’

  ‘Yes please!’ Lorinda breathed as she obediently packed her woven straw box after the funeral. ‘Please come, Mam!’

  So far this hadn’t happened, which was why Lorinda was standing on a cracket at Auntie Doris’s sink, in the kitchen of a boarding house in Finkle Street, with her tears going ‘plop’ in the washing-up water.

  ‘Ada!’ she said out loud and sighed. She had been proud of her pretty name; no one else in the street in Durham had been called Lorinda. Still, Ada was her mother’s name and she comforted herself with the thought that she could still be Lorinda in her own mind. She sighed and wiped her eyes on the corner of her apron; she wasn’t going to let Auntie Doris see her cry. Squaring her shoulders and lifting her chin, she got on with the work.

  ‘I’ll stick up for myself,’ she said out loud. Grannie always said she should stick up for herself, not let anyone get her down.

  Soon Auntie Doris was back and the rest of the day passed in a blur for the newly named Ada. She fetched and carried at her aunt’s demands until her thin arms ached with tiredness.

  ‘There’s six men and a lad will be wanting their dinners at half past six on the dot,’ said Auntie Doris, blowing a strand of grey hair back from her red face as she lifted an enormous iron pan from the fire and rested it on the fender. Uncle Harry was laying the tables in the front room where the lodgers ate their meals, presided over by Auntie Doris and Uncle Harry. ‘You can eat your dinner in here,’ she added. ‘I don’t want you in the front room, getting in the way, most like.’ As she spoke she was dishing out huge platefuls of meat pudding, potatoes and cabbage. Deftly she piled them onto a battered tin tray and took them through the door into the hall.

  Relief and delight shone in Ada’s eyes. She had been afraid she wasn’t going to get any dinner herself. Her stomach rumbled. After all, she hadn’t eaten since leaving Durham that morning.

  Auntie Doris was soon back in the kitchen for the jam roly-poly, shovelling it onto thick, white soup plates and smothering it in yellow custard.

  ‘Let the bairn go in and sit at the table with us.’

  Ada looked up to see Uncle Harry, who had appeared behind his wife. The wet ends of his moustache were sucked to a point and Ada stared at them, feeling slightly repelled.

  ‘You mind your own business! She’s my sister’s brat, not yours!’ came the sharp retort, causing Uncle Harry to shrug and back out of the kitchen ineffectively. Ada sat down at the kitchen table; she didn’t mind where she ate so long as she ate. Her thin legs dangled inches from the floor and she propped herself up with her elbows on the table.

  ‘Sit up straight! And mind you eat it all up! I cannot abide wasted food. While you’re a good girl and do your work properly, you will get proper meals.’

  To do Auntie Doris justice, the plate she set before the girl was piled high with meat pudding and potatoes and Ada tucked in with a will, relishing the thick, meaty gravy. Auntie Doris left her to it, going back into the front room with her tin tray loaded with plates of jam roly-poly.

  Ada had eaten only a few mouthfuls when her head drooped, the long, black lashes closing over the violet eyes. She woke with a start and propped her chin on her left hand, the elbow supported on the table. She tried another bite of the suet pudding doused in rich gravy but she was unequal to the task and inevitably her head sank lower and lower until it was cradled in her arm and she fell properly asleep. For she was still only seven years old and the momentous happenings of the day had been too much for her altogether.

  A few minutes la
ter the door to the passage opened and a boy of about fourteen came into the kitchen on his way to the lavatory in the back yard. His sandy eyebrows lifted in surprise when he saw the little girl sleeping peacefully at the table, her dark curls falling over her forehead and her hand clutched round a spoon over her rapidly congealing dinner.

  Clumsy in his hobnailed boots he tiptoed to the back door, fearing to disturb her, but she was too sound asleep for that. He closed the door quietly behind him as he wondered who she was, surely not family; as far as he knew the Parkers had no children. The peaceful scene was changed as he came back into the house, the angry voice of his landlady rang out as he opened the back door.

  ‘I told you to eat your dinner! Well, you’d better eat it now, cold or not or you’ll get it for your breakfast. I don’t hold with wasting food, I told you before!’ Doris Parker was standing with her hands on her hips, her eyes glaring from a bright, red face as she bent over the child shouting her threats.

  The boy closed the door and began the walk through the kitchen, away from the angry voice. But he stayed a moment, his attention arrested as the girl lifted large, violet eyes and stared back at her aunt. For all her small stature, her chin was set firmly and defiantly.

  ‘I couldn’t help going to sleep, could I? I was tired!’

  ‘Don’t you cheek me, just you do as you’re told!’ Auntie Doris raised her hand for a blow, she was admitting no excuses.

  After a moment, Ada dropped her eyes and started to eat. She took a bite and chewed doggedly, looking up from her plate and letting her gaze rove around the room. Noticing the boy, she paused and looked curiously at him. He winked at her, rolling his eyes in the direction of Auntie Doris before grinning his support.

  Ada smiled, revealing a missing tooth, and winked back, albeit inexpertly. She saw a red-headed, green-eyed boy, tall and well-built. He was dressed in old working clothes: a red-checked shirt which clashed violently with his carroty hair, together with an old and stained serge suit which looked far too tight for him. A good two inches of wrist showed beneath the cuffs of the jacket. His hands, though rough and scarred by manual work, were well-shaped and capable-looking. Ada had time to notice all this before her aunt butted in.