THE MALTESE ANGEL
Catherine Cookson
Contents
The Catherine Cookson Story
The Maltese Angel
BOOK ONE
PART ONE One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
PART TWO One
Two
Three
Four
Five
BOOK TWO
PART ONE One
Two
PART TWO One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
PART THREE One
Two
Three
BOOK THREE
PART ONE One
Two
Three
Four
Five
PART TWO One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
The Catherine Cookson Story
In brief:
Her books have sold over 130 million copies in 26 languages throughout the world and still counting…
Catherine Cookson was born Katherine Ann McMullen on June 27th, 1906 in the bleak industrial heartland of Tyne Dock, South Shields (then part of County Durham) and later moved to East Jarrow, which is now in Tyne and Wear.
She was the illegitimate daughter of Kate Fawcett, an alcoholic, whom she thought was her sister. She was raised by her grandparents, Rose and John McMullen. The poverty, exploitation, and bigotry she experienced in her early years aroused deep emotions that stayed with her throughout her life and which became part of her stories. Catherine left school at 13, and after a period of domestic service, she took a job in a laundry at Harton Workhouse in South Shields. In 1929, she moved south to run the laundry at Hastings Workhouse, working all hours and saving every penny to buy a large Victorian house. She took in gentleman and lady lodgers to supplement her income and took up fencing as one of her hobbies. One of her lodgers was Tom Cookson, a teacher at Hastings Grammar School, and in June 1940, they married. They were devoted to each other throughout their lives together. But the early years of her marriage were beset by the tragic miscarriage of four pregnancies and her subsequent mental breakdown. This took her over a decade to recover from, which she did, often by standing in front of a mirror and giving herself a damn good swearing at!
Catherine took up writing as a form of therapy to deal with her depression and joined the Hastings Writers’ Group. Her first novel, Kate Hannigan, was published in 1950. In 1976, she returned to Northumberland with Tom and went on to write 104 books in all. She became one of the most successful novelists of all time and was one of the first authors to have three or four titles in the Bestseller Lists at the same time.
Besides writing, she was an innovative painter, and she believed that her father’s genes fostered the strength to work hard, but also, in rare moments of freedom, to strive to better herself. Catherine was famed for her care of money but had given much to charities, hospitals, and medical research in areas close to her heart and to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, who set up a lectureship in hematology. The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust continues to donate generously to charitable causes. The University later conferred her the Honorary Degree of Master of Arts. She received the Freedom of the Borough of South Tyneside, today known as Catherine Cookson Country. The Variety Club of Great Britain named her Writer of the Year, and she was voted Personality of the North East. Other honours followed: an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1986, and she was created Dame of the British Empire in 1993. She was appointed an Honorary Fellow at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford in 1997.
Throughout her life, but especially in the later years, she was plagued by a rare vascular disease, telangiectasia, which caused bleeding from the nose, fingers, and stomach, and resulted in anemia. As her health declined, she and her husband moved for a final time to Jesmond in Newcastle upon Tyne to be nearer medical facilities. For the last few years of her life, she was bedridden and Tom hardly ever left her bedside, looking after her needs, cooking for her, and taking her on her emergency trips, often in the middle of the night into Newcastle. Their lives were still made up of the seven-day week and twelve or more hours each day, going over the fan mail, attending to charities, and going over the latest dictated book, with Tom meticulously making corrections line by line, for Catherine’s eyesight had long faded in her 80s.
This most remarkable woman passed away on June 11th, 1998 at the age of 91. Tom, six years her junior, had earlier suffered a heart attack but survived long enough to be with her at her end. He passed away on 28th June, just 17 days after his beloved Catherine.
Catherine Cookson’s Books
NOVELS
Colour Blind
Maggie Rowan
Rooney
The Menagerie
Fanny McBride
Fenwick Houses
The Garment
The Blind Miller
The Wingless Bird
Hannah Massey
The Long Corridor
The Unbaited Trap
Slinky Jane
Katie Mulholland
The Round Tower
The Nice Bloke
The Glass Virgin
The Invitation
The Dwelling Place
Feathers in the Fire
Pure as the Lily
The Invisible Cord
The Gambling Man
The Tide of Life
The Girl
The Cinder Path
The Man Who Cried
The Whip
The Black Velvet Gown
A Dinner of Herbs
The Moth
The Parson’s Daughter
The Harrogate Secret
The Cultured Handmaiden
The Black Candle
The Gillyvors
My Beloved Son
The Rag Nymph
The House of Women
The Maltese Angel
The Golden Straw
The Year of the Virgins
The Tinker’s Girl
Justice is a Woman
A Ruthless Need
The Bonny Dawn
The Branded Man
The Lady on my Left
The Obsession
The Upstart
The Blind Years
Ril
ey
The Solace of Sin
The Desert Crop
The Thursday Friend
A House Divided
Rosie of the River
The Silent Lady
FEATURING KATE HANNIGAN
Kate Hannigan (her first published novel)
Kate Hannigan’s Girl (her hundredth published novel)
THE MARY ANN NOVELS
A Grand Man
The Lord and Mary Ann
The Devil and Mary Ann
Love and Mary Ann
Life and Mary Ann
Marriage and Mary Ann
Mary Ann’s Angels
Mary Ann and Bill
FEATURING BILL BAILEY
Bill Bailey
Bill Bailey’s Lot
Bill Bailey’s Daughter
The Bondage of Love
THE TILLY TROTTER TRILOGY
Tilly Trotter
Tilly Trotter Wed
Tilly Trotter Widowed
THE MALLEN TRILOGY
The Mallen Streak
The Mallen Girl
The Mallen Litter
FEATURING HAMILTON
Hamilton
Goodbye Hamilton
Harold
AS CATHERINE MARCHANT
Heritage of Folly
The Fen Tiger
House of Men
The Iron Façade
Miss Martha Mary Crawford
The Slow Awakening
CHILDREN’S
Matty Doolin
Joe and the Gladiator
The Nipper
Rory’s Fortune
Our John Willie
Mrs. Flannagan’s Trumpet
Go Tell It To Mrs Golightly
Lanky Jones
Bill and The Mary Ann Shaughnessy
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Our Kate
Let Me Make Myself Plain
Plainer Still
The Maltese Angel
Catherine Cookson was at her towering best in this immensely powerful novel which spanned more than three decades, from the 1880s through World War I and beyond, as it told the story of a young man’s fateful decision and the enduring influence it had on future generations.
Ward Gibson’s heart and mind were in turmoil as he rode home from Newcastle, across the Tyne, to the prosperous Durham farm he had just inherited from his father. He was already his own assured man, though still only in his twenties. But what about marriage? He knew what was expected of him by the village folk, and especially by the Mason family, whose daughter Daisy he had known all his life. But now in a single week, his world had been turned upside down by a dancer, an ethereal being who seemed to float across the stage of the Empire Music Hall, where she was appearing under the professional name of The Maltese Angel. Night after night he had been to see her, and each time only served to confirm his conviction that this was no passing infatuation but the birth of a devotion that would endure as long as life itself.
Ward’s persistence allowed him to meet Stephanie McQueen, or Fanny, as she was known. The attraction was mutual, and after a courtship of only a few weeks they married. But already a scorpion had emerged. To the local community, Ward had betrayed their expectations and cruelly deserted poor Daisy. There followed a series of reprisals on his family, one of them tragic enough for Ward to enact a terrible revenge on the perpetrators. The legacy of these events was a bitter one, at times erupting into terrible violence, that would twist and turn the course of many lives through Ward’s own and succeeding generations.
The narrative is rich in characterisation and brilliantly reflects a turbulent historical era’s effects on the aspirations, fears and follies of individuals.
Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1992
The right of Catherine Cookson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
This book is sold subject to the condition it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form.
ISBN 978-1-78036-072-0
Sketch by Harriet Anstruther
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described, all situations in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
Published by
Peach Publishing
BOOK ONE
1886-1888
PART ONE
One
It had taken him only half an hour from leaving Newcastle to reach the first gate of his farm. He had ridden faster than usual, yet all the while asking himself why, because once he got into the house, what would he do? He’d sit down at the table, put his elbows on it, droop his head into his hands and ask himself, and for the countless time, what his reaction would have been had the company at The Empire not been engaged for another week; and the answer he would give would be: he didn’t know.
Things had moved too fast: he had never been in a situation like this in his life; he had never felt like this in his life; he had never even known what love was. He had known what need was. Oh, aye. And that had been a kind of torment. And so was this present feeling; but a different kind of torment…No, no; he couldn’t call it torment, not this feeling of elation, of being taken out of himself; it was like being lifted onto some high hill…mountain; yes, mountain; and experiencing an exhilarating emotion flooding through him, more cleansing than frost-filled air in the early dawn.
He would then ask himself if he had gone out of his mind. Four times only had he seen the girl…no, the young woman…no, the beautiful creature that appeared to him as someone not quite human.
It couldn’t be because he was unused to looking at turns on the stage: at least once a month over the past two years he had sat through a performance at The Empire or at one of the other theatres in the city; he had even sat through a play by Shakespeare, which, and he had to admit it, wasn’t much to his taste; the twang and the rigmarole were hard to get into …
He pulled up at the second gate and, leaning from the saddle, unlatched the iron hoop from the stanchion; but his hand became still for a moment when he looked across the dark field towards the outbuildings of his farm and saw the movement of a lantern, not coming from the direction of the cow byres or the piggeries, or yet from the hen crees in the field, which might have denoted a fox on his rounds and Billy Compton after him, for there was no sound of barking from the dogs; nor was it coming from the floor of the old barn, but from the loft.
Having urged his mount through the gate, he turned in the saddle and replaced the hoop, then put the animal into a gallop towards the mud yard. There, dismounting, he patted its rump, and pushed it towards its stable, saying, ‘Be with you in a minute, Betty,’ before hurrying down the yard and entering an open-fronted barn.
Approaching the ladder that rose to the loft, he shouted, ‘You up there, Billy?’
In answer, a head appeared above him, saying, ‘Aye, Master Ward. ’Tis I up here all right; and a visitor. Better you come up and make his acquaintance like.’
When Ward Gibson reached the loft floor his eyes were drawn to a small figure hunched against the old timbers of the sloping roof, and he walked slowly towards it, saying, ‘Aye! Aye! And who’s this when he’s out?’
‘Can’t get a word out of him, master. But he’s in one hell of a state for a bairn.’
‘What do you mean, hell of a state?’ Ward’s voice was low; and so was the old man’s as he replied, ‘He’s been thrashed, an’ badly; scourged, I would say. An’ he doesn’t seem to have any wits left him, he’s so full of fear. Shook like an aspen when I first spoke to him.’
Ward dropped onto his hunkers before the very small figure said, ‘Hello there! What’s your name?’
Two round eyes stared back at him. The lids blinked rapidly, but the boy’s lips did not move.
‘Come along, now; you’ve got a name. There
’s nobody here goin’ to touch you.’
The old man, too, was now on his hunkers, and he held his hand out gently towards the boy, saying, ‘Let the master look at your back, laddie. Just let him see your back. Come on, now. Come on.’
After a moment the boy slowly hitched himself round, and as slowly Billy lifted up the dirty grey shirt and so exposed in the light of the lantern the scarlet weals criss-crossing each other from the small shoulders down to the equally small buttocks, and that these overlaid older scars.
The elder man now spoke in a whisper: ‘That whip had a number of tails, don’t you think, master? An’ take a look at his wrists,’ and so saying he gently pulled the shirt down and turned the boy round again, and, taking up the small dirt-grimed hands, pointed to the wrists. ‘Tarry rope, I would say. But look at the ankle! That’s definitely a chain mark.’
The old man now looked at his master, waiting for him to speak; but it was some seconds before Ward, holding out his hand, said, ‘Come along, son. Nobody’s going to hurt you here. Come on.’
The boy did not at first move, but when he attempted to stand up he almost toppled; and instinctively Ward went to pick him up; but the child, as he proved to be from his stature, shunned back from him. And again Ward said, ‘There’s no-one going to hurt you here. Come on; walk if you can; otherwise, I’ll carry you.’
The boy now walked unsteadily down the loft; but when he came to the edge of the platform and seemed as if he might be about to fall, without any hesitation now, Ward lifted him up and, holding him in one arm, made his way down the ladder.
Outside, and about to cross the yard, he said to Billy, ‘Is Annie in the cottage?’
‘Aye; she is, master; in bed this half-hour. But there’s your supper in the oven, and plenty of cold victuals. But if you think I should get her up…’
‘No. We’ll do what is necessary…How did you find him?’
‘’Twas the dogs. Flo was uneasy; even Cap kept runnin’ back and for’ard. An’ when Flo barked at the bottom of the ladder, well, I knew somebody was up there. When I shouted twice an’ got no answer, I yelled I had me gun with me, and I pushed Flo up afront like. But as soon as she discovered the boy she stopped her yappin’. Funny, but he didn’t seem to be feared of her.’