Fallen Angels Read online

  About the Book

  Lily Fowler, shunned by society, is alone, frightened and heavily pregnant on the streets of Hull. When her attempts to find work are proved futile, her only option is to work as a madam in a brothel, where she finds unexpected solace in the company of the other women working there. Together they strive to leave these miserable times behind.

  Bound together by bonds far stronger than normal friendship, these fallen angels bid farewell to the slums, and to their very great surprise, doors swing open, lost loves are recovered and the happy endings that none of them dared to dream of begin to materialise.

  A gripping new novel by the bestselling winner of the Catherine Cookson Prize for fiction.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  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

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Sources

  About the Author

  Also by Valerie Wood

  Copyright

  FALLEN ANGELS

  Valerie Wood

  For Peter, Ruth, Catherine and Alex.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘Get your hands off me, Billy Fowler! In God’s name, what ’you doing? Tek it off me!’

  Lily struggled and swore as her husband pulled the noose tighter round her waist. He had asked Daisy to pass him the rope from the back of the cart and when she did so he had swiftly made a loop and flung it over Lily’s head.

  She had known he was up to something from the minute he had ordered her and Daisy out of the cart in which they had been travelling since before daybreak. It was now midday and both she and her daughter were exhausted and hungry. Lily could barely stand, her legs were so cramped and her body ached so much.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’ she demanded. ‘Tek it off, damn you! Why are we here? Why’ve you brought us to this place?’

  ‘Shut your face!’ Billy Fowler was shorter than Lily, with a pot belly and a temper which outdid hers. He fastened the end of the rope to the shaft and securely knotted it. ‘You’ll stop here till I come back. I need a drink.’

  He’d driven into the inn yard and enquired of a stable lad how much it would cost to leave the horse and cart for the afternoon. Money had changed hands as Lily watched suspiciously. Billy had woken her early that morning, and ordered her and Daisy to hurry and get ready; woozy with sleep they had left home even before light had broken as a faint glimmer on the horizon beyond the sea which was almost on their doorstep.

  ‘What game’re you playing, Billy?’ she said now. ‘What ’you up to?’

  ‘No game,’ he said with a grim laugh, ‘and you’ll find out soon enough.’

  ‘Fetch us some water,’ she called after him as he headed towards the inn door.

  He grunted and walked on. Lily looked down at her daughter. ‘We’ll be all right, Daisy. Just try and get this rope undone, will you?’

  Daisy nodded. She was fair and thin, nothing like her dark-haired mother. ‘What’s he doing, Ma?’ Her voice was croaky with tiredness and she plucked ineffectively at the rope which held her mother fast. ‘Why are we here? Where are we?’

  It was a question they had asked Billy constantly on the journey but one that he had refused to answer. Lily pressed her lips together. She didn’t trust him one jot, but their days were dull and monotonous, which was why she had compliantly climbed into the cart that morning, hoping for an outing.

  ‘We’re in Hull, I think,’ she answered. ‘Onny I don’t know why. We’ll find out when he’s ready to tell us. If I could onny get this damn rope off. It’s nipping me no end.’

  Her son Ted had stayed behind. Billy had given him orders to feed the hens and goats and dig over the vegetable plot, telling him brusquely to make sure he did it properly or there would be trouble when Billy got home that night. The boy, at thirteen sullen and silent, watched from the doorway of the cottage as his mother and sister climbed into the cart.

  Billy had bought the flat, two-wheeled open vehicle at a knock-down price. It had slatted sides and was without any shelter from the elements, and he had fashioned the driver’s seat from a wooden box. A coil of rope and several empty sacks were in the back and Lily had spread the latter out for her and Daisy to sit on, grumbling at Billy as she did so and saying she hoped they were not going far as the weather didn’t seem promising. It was cold and damp, but as dawn broke and the sky lightened, she and Daisy twitched their nostrils as the smells of spring cheered them.

  They had driven into the coastal village of Withernsea and then along the road towards the thriving market town of Patrington. Lily had perked up, thinking this was their destination: she would enjoy that. But Billy had driven straight through without stopping, ignoring her questioning, and taken the road to Hedon, another market town where he had stopped at a hostelry to buy a jug of ale. He’d drunk thirstily from it and then handed it to Lily; she’d taken several deep gulps and given it to Daisy to finish off.

  They’d continued along a turnpike road where Billy had to pay for their passage; Lily saw the tops of ships’ masts and tall cranes beyond the marshy land and guessed they were travelling alongside the Humber estuary to the large town of Hull, a place she had never been.

  Lily winced as a pain shot through her belly. Hope that’s not a sign of summat, she thought, biting her lips together. Babby’s not due for ages. She tried to put her fingers between the rope and her belly to ease the tightness. Mebbe the rocking of the cart has disturbed it. Why’s he tied me up? Does he think I’ll run away? God knows I would if I had somewhere to run to. She began to worry about the long journey back. Would Billy pay for a night’s lodgings? Somehow she doubted it. And what was his business here anyway that he needed her and Daisy to be involved in it?

  Billy came back bearing a jug of water and a hunk of bread. ‘Here,’ he said, thrusting them towards her. ‘Get that down you.’

  Mother and daughter drank thirstily and shared the bread. ‘You going to tell me what this is about, then? My patience is stretched to its limits. What ’you up to, Billy Fowler?’

  They had had a ferocious argument just a few days before, one of many, but this time it had centred on Daisy and the child that Lily wa
s expecting. He’d told Lily that the girl would have to find work, as a kitchen or laundry maid in one of the farmhouses. He’d suggested too that Lily should try to get rid of the baby. ‘I can’t afford to keep all these bairns,’ he’d bellowed at her.

  She’d shouted back. ‘You should’ve thought of that afore asking me to come here. You knew I’d got two childre’ and besides, Ted earns his keep. You mek him work all ’hours God sends.’

  He’d said nothing more but she knew he was stewing with resentment, and wished with all her heart that she had never married him but had stayed as she was, a young widow living in her home village of Hollym, able to work and given parish assistance for the two children.

  Her husband, Johnny Leigh-Maddeson, whom she had known since childhood, had been passionate about joining the army. ‘It’s my ambition, Lily,’ he’d pleaded when she’d wept over his plans. ‘I’ll get leave, and I’ll save my pay to bring home.’ And because she loved him she knew she couldn’t hold him back. After they were married and when she was expecting Ted, she lived with her widowed mother in the cottage where she had been born. Johnny was sent to Ireland and returned when Ted was six months old and she immediately conceived with Daisy. He came back again in time for his daughter’s birth and thought she was as bonny a bairn as the flower she was named for and a month later was once more recalled to his unit.

  ‘Sorry, lass,’ he’d said, hugging Lily close. ‘But that’s ’way it is when you’re married to a sodger. But I’ll be back,’ he promised. ‘Never fear.’

  She saw him just once more when Ted was three and Daisy already walking and talking, and then never again. Though Johnny hadn’t been a good hand at writing, she had previously had grubby notes from time to time which said he was missing her and longing to see her and the children, but then there was only silence.

  Nearly three years passed before Lily wrote to his commanding officer who replied briefly that Johnny had been posted to Afghanistan where there was conflict but that he couldn’t give any further information. Two more years went by and she was giving up hope that she would ever see him again, but asked the parson if he would write to the regiment for her, thinking that a letter from him would carry more weight than hers; the reply he received gave the grave news that Johnny’s regiment had suffered heavy losses in Afghanistan and had been posted to India. They had no record of John Leigh-Maddeson and must presume that he was missing, possibly having died in action. She was devastated by the news and felt that all hope had gone.

  She met Billy Fowler at the Plough Inn in Hollym where she worked in the evening to supplement her parish relief and the money she earned as a washerwoman in the big houses of the village. She was poor and she was lonely after her mother’s death, and she worried about the children’s not having a father. Billy became a regular at the inn; he seemed to be a quiet man and often asked her to go out walking, which she refused to do. Eventually he tried to persuade her that she should come and live with him in his cottage just a few miles up the road at Seathorne. ‘I’ve got a bit o’ land,’ he’d said. ‘Enough to live on.’

  ‘You’d have to marry me,’ she told him. ‘I’d want that security. And I’d have to bring my bairns.’

  She had seen doubt in his eyes, and he’d asked how long it would be before her son could work. Ted was eleven by then and she told Billy that he was already doing jobs in farms after school and at harvest time.

  ‘So what happened to your husband?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Dead,’ she’d said regretfully, knowing that no one could ever take Johnny’s place. ‘He was a sodger. I’ve not seen him in years. My bairns don’t even remember him. He was posted to Afghanistan so I reckon them foreigners killed him and nobody found his body.’

  The parson had seen no reason why they shouldn’t be married if there was no objection after the reading of the banns, which there wasn’t. Billy didn’t buy her a wedding ring, ‘because,’ he said, ‘you’ve got one already,’ which should have warned her of the type of man he really was: mean, miserly and with no warmth or laughter in him whatsoever. She rued the day she had met him as soon as she set eyes on the dismal hovel he called a smallholding which teetered on the edge of the eroding cliff.

  She was used to the sound of the sea having lived only a mile from it all of her life, but never had she lain awake trembling in her bed, hearing the crash and thunder of the waves battering the cliff beneath them and waiting for what seemed to be the inevitable fall on to the sands below.

  ‘Come on, then,’ she said now as she stood defiantly in front of him in the inn yard. ‘Spit it out! What can you buy here in Hull that you can’t buy nearer home? And why’ve you tied me up?’

  He gave a thin lopsided grin. ‘Not buy,’ he answered, jiggling the rope which held her. ‘Sell!’

  ‘What?’ Lily struggled to free herself but he pulled the rope tighter. ‘Damn you, Billy Fowler. Tek it off!’

  He sneered. ‘I’m sick o’ you and your bairns. I telled you I haven’t come to buy. I’m here to sell. I’m selling you for ’best price I can get and I’m throwing in that bairn for free, cos I don’t want her either.’

  Daisy began to cry but Lily was speechless. He’d gone off his head. He must have done. ‘You can’t do that,’ she yelled when she got her wits back. ‘You can’t sell people like you sell cows or pigs!’

  Billy gave a harsh laugh. ‘I’ve heard as you can. Some years back a fellow from Patrington sold his wife at Hull market. Got a good price for her from all accounts.’ He jiggled the rope again and freed it from the shaft. ‘So come on, my beauty. Let’s be off. Let’s see how much we can get for you.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘You’re mad,’ Lily protested, struggling to get free. ‘Law will say that you are.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Billy grinned, a tic flickering on his top lip. ‘There’s no law says a man can’t sell his own wife and besides, I just telled you, it’s been done afore so there’s a press— press something or other, which means you can do it again.’ He tugged on the rope, forcing her to move on or be cut in two.

  ‘I’m expecting a babby!’ she shouted at him. ‘Your babby.’

  ‘Should get more for you then, shouldn’t I? Like selling a horse in foal or a goat in kid. A real bargain!’

  Lily stumbled after him out of the inn yard and into the Market Place. Canvas stalls crowded round a magnificent church. The vendors were shouting their wares, holding up squawking hens in one hand and dead rabbits in the other. Stallholders were selling hot pies and baked potatoes and from them came a delicious smell, reminding Lily that she was hungry. They had had little breakfast and since then only the hunk of bread.

  Daisy was weeping and catching hold of her. ‘Ma, he can’t do this to you! It’s not right. Shall I run and fetch a constable?’

  Billy grabbed her wrist. ‘I heard you, you little varmint. You’ll stop here wi’ me or I’ll sell you to somebody else and you’ll not go wi’ your ma.’

  He trudged on past the church, looking for the best place to stand and make his pronouncement. There were hundreds of people milling about, buying, selling, and all of them bargaining. Some were carrying sacks of potatoes; others had fur or fowl in wicker baskets. There were poor people dressed in rags, others who were clean but shabby, and yet others who were well dressed and just looking at what was going on around them. A group of gypsies ran by leading several horses and putting them through their paces, showing them to advantage.

  ‘That’s what I oughter do wi’ you,’ he muttered. ‘Onny I don’t suppose you can run being as how you are.’

  ‘I’ll kill you, Billy Fowler,’ Lily yelled at him, tugging on the rope. ‘As soon as I get this off me, you’ll wish you’d never been born!’

  He ignored what she was saying and plodded on, pulling her behind him, until he came to a more open place at the west end of the church, where several people, men and women, were standing on boxes and airing their views on the state of the country or the plight
of the poor, or inviting those who would listen to come and be saved by the Lord.

  Billy eyed them, assessing the situation. One man had come to the end of his address and was looking about him. He had been preaching of hell and damnation but no one was listening. Whatever he had had to say wasn’t of sufficient interest for anyone to stop. He stepped down from his box and Billy hurried towards him.

  ‘I’ll give you threepence for ’loan of your box for an hour,’ he said.

  The man sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He was thin-faced and didn’t look as if he’d had a good meal in a long time. ‘Threepence’ll buy me nowt. Sixpence,’ he said. ‘For half an hour.’

  Billy turned away. ‘An hour, then,’ the man called.

  ‘Done,’ Billy said, reaching into his pocket.

  ‘Are you selling or preaching?’ the man asked, taking the money from him and clutching it tightly in his hand. ‘They’re an ungodly rabble.’

  ‘Selling,’ Billy said briefly. ‘But nowt that you’d want.’

  ‘No,’ the preacher muttered as he walked away. ‘All I want is a square meal and a place in heaven.’

  Lily shouted after him. ‘This fellow won’t help you with either; he’s destined for hell fire.’

  ‘Shut your face,’ Billy growled, and pushed her up on to the box. ‘If you don’t be quiet I’ll tek your lass and drop her in ’Humber.’ He lifted a warning finger. ‘I mean it, don’t think I don’t. And I’ll leave you to fend for yoursen.’

  She was silenced and pulled her shawl round her. It had belonged to her mother and was worn in places but voluminous and warm. She was beginning to feel ill. Her back ached and her body felt heavy. She licked her dry lips. I hope to God I’m not starting in labour. ‘Daisy,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Try and get me a sup o’ water. There’ll be a pump somewhere about. Ask somebody to lend you a cup or a jug.’

  Daisy dashed away to one of the stalls before Billy could stop her and Lily saw her talking to the vendor. He looked across towards Lily and, handing Daisy a cup, pointed down the street.