Fallen Angels

After her dastardly husband Billy tries to sell her at a wife sale, Lily Fowler finds herself alone, frightened and heavily pregnant on the streets of Hull.
Her brave attempts to find work are futile and when she is turned away from the workhouse and other such establishments for women in her 'condition', Lily is forced to swallow her last iota of respectability and work in a brothel in Leadenhall Square.
Unexpectedly things begin to look up. Lily sees potential where others can only see destitution and ruin and soon forges strong relationships with the other women there. They are all good-hearted women who have fallen on hard times and together Lily and her 'fallen angels' outwit the low-life brothel-keeper and work to turn the house in Leadenhall Square into something altogether more respectable. And before any of them know it, doors swing open, lost loves are recovered and the happy endings none of them dared to dream of begin to materialise ...

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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 as 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, but with a pot belly and a temper which outdid hers. He fastened the end of the rope to the cart shaft and securely knotted it. ‘You’ll stop here ‘til 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 vehicle 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 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 he 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 cart 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 toward the town of Patrington. This was a thriving market town and Lily perked up, thinking that 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 gave it to Daisy to finish off.
They’d continued travelling 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 was centred on Daisy and the child that Lily was 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 that 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 Daisy’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 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; but the reply he received gave 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 washer woman 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 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 him 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 and she rued the day she had met him as soon as she set eyes on the dismal hovel he called a small holding 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 onto 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 and 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.’