The Black Candle Read online

  THE BLACK CANDLE

  Catherine Cookson

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Titlepage

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  Books by Catherine Cookson

  Description

  Copyright

  PART ONE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  PART TWO Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  PART THREE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  PART FOUR Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART FIVE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  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.

  She read widely: from Chaucer to the literature of the 1920s; to Plato’s Apologia on the trial and death of Socrates (she said that here was someone who stuck to his principles even unto death); to history of the nineteenth century and the Romantic poets; to Lord Chesterfield’s Letters To His Son and the books and booklets that abounded in her part of the country dealing with coal, iron, lead, glass, farming and the railways. She disliked it when her books were labeled as ‘romantic.’ To her, they were ‘readable social history of the North East interwoven into the lives of the people.’ For the millions of her readers, she brought ‘an understanding of themselves’ or perhaps of their dear ones. Her stories do not bring in a realism in which the worst is taken for granted, but a realism in which love, caring, and compassion appear, and most certainly, hope. ‘This type of realism does exist,’ Tom Cookson said of her writing. There is nothing sentimental about her writing; she is unrelenting in the strong images she invokes and the characters she portrays. They were born of her formative years and her personal struggles. Many of her novels have been transferred to stage, film, and radio with her television adaptations on ITV, lasting over a decade and achieving ratings of over 10 million viewers.

  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

&n
bsp; 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

  Riley

  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 Black Candle

  Bridget Deane Mordaunt was a woman of some consequence in her own part of the world. Inheriting her father’s businesses at the age of nineteen, by the time she was twenty-three in 1880 she was running them with as firm and confident a hand on the tiller as any man. She had also become known as a good and considerate employer whose workers could regard their ‘Miss Bridget’ with affection as well as respect.

  Yet the path destiny required Bridget to follow was not an easy one. Her feckless cousin Victoria became infatuated with Lionel Filmore, the fortune-hunting elder son of an old but impoverished family living in the decayed grandeur of Grove House. Bridget had no illusions about Lionel, but at the same time Victoria’s happiness was something for which she would give and yield much. So a pattern began to form that would shape the lives of generations to come; a pattern of some good and some great evil, but all of it inexorably linking Bridget ever more closely with the Filmores and their House.

  The Black Candle displays all the skills of narrative and the shrewd perception of human strengths and frailties. This is a story spanning nearly half a century, ever engrossing, with a diversity of brilliantly realised characters, particularly Bridget Mordaunt, a strikingly memorable woman who illustrates the truth that while people are changed by events they remain essentially the same inside.

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1989

  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 978-1-78036-043-0

  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

  PART ONE

  AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING

  1883

  One

  It was a Sunday in late September. The heat from the sun was such that the two young men picking blackberries had undone the top buttons of their Sunday coats, loosened their string ties and let the collars of their blue-striped shirts fall open, but still kept their caps on their heads.

  The one who looked the elder was thickset; what hair could be seen under the rim of his cap was brown. The other was slim-built and fair; his hair was straight and sticking with sweat to his cheeks, and he now threw a handful of blackberries into the bass-bag that was almost half full of fruit, saying as he did so, ‘I’m finished. I’m sweltered. Anyway, there must be six pounds in there.’ And to this the other replied, ‘I want it full. She always has it full.’

  ‘It’s Sunday, man.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Aye, it is; and I’m off.’

  ‘Begod, you’re not! Now you get your hand in there again.’ The thickset young man paused and raised his head to where the bramble bush was entangled in the lower branches of one of the sycamore trees that hedged the field and, pressing the brambles aside, he looked to his right towards where the sycamores joined with the woodland from which a horseman was emerging. He had heard the noise of the gallop, but the horse had now fallen into a trot.

  His brother, standing close by his side now, was also peering through the bramble. Then, some other movement catching his eye, he looked to the left to where, in the distance and skirting the field, was the figure of a woman, or a girl.

  A dig in the ribs made the elder brother turn and look towards the figure, and recognition slowly dawning on him caused his eyes to narrow and his mouth to drop into a gape; but then, gripping his brother by the shoulder, he pulled him down beside him to the ground, for the horse had not only continued to approach but had stopped within a yard or so from them on the other side of the hedge.

  When the younger man now mouthed a name his brother doubled his fist in his face; after which they both remained on their hunkers but with their heads poked forward.

  Through the tangled brambles they could just discern the gaitered legs of the rider as he walked the horse forward, seemingly to where the girl was standing.

  It was the man’s voice that came to them first. He was saying, ‘Who wrote that note?’ But he didn’t get an answer for some seconds; then the girl said, ‘Me. I did.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were so advanced.’

  ‘I can write a bit, an’ read.’

  ‘Well, you mustn’t write me any more notes. You understand? In fact, you mustn’t try to get in touch with me again. You’re a silly girl.’ Then the man’s voice changed as he said, ‘No, you’re not. You’re not a silly girl. You are beautiful, so beautiful, all beautiful.’ And then there was a slight laugh as he added, ‘Except your hands. Odd about your hands, stained, podgy.’

  ‘Don’t touch me!’

  ‘Now, now.’

  ‘I said, don’t touch me, not ever again. But what am I going to do? Me da will put me out. I’ve nowhere. I won’t go to the workhouse, I won’t!’

  ‘Sh! Sh! You’ll not go to the workhouse. And anyway, all this is your own fault. You should never have been made like you are, dear: you ask for it, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t ask you to touch me. Never wanted it. It was th
e barn dance, and the beer. I never knew what I was up to.’

  ‘Oh yes, you did. You knew what you were up to all right.’

  ‘I didn’t, never! But I do now.’

  ‘You could have been with someone else, my dear.’

  ‘I haven’t. I wasn’t. You know I wasn’t. I mean, you know I hadn’t. And that’s what you said, you knew I hadn’t.’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to do? I can do nothing now. Anyway, you’ve been refusing me lately.’

  ‘I…I want it taken away. I have no money. But I tell you, I won’t go into the workhouse, I’ll go in the river first!’

  ‘Don’t be silly, girl! Don’t be silly!’

  ‘I’m not silly. You believe me, I’m not silly.’

  ‘So you want money?’

  ‘Aye. Well, enough to take it away. I’ll…I’ll take money now; I wouldn’t afore. Remember that, I wouldn’t afore.’

  ‘No. No, you wouldn’t, would you? That’s something in your favour. How much will you need?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll…I’ll have to go away some place, into the city, or some place. I…I won’t go to old Nell’s. She takes ’em away all right, oh yes, but she cripples you. I’ve seen ’em.’

  ‘Oh, you’re well versed in this kind of thing, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, I ain’t. But I know what happens when you ain’t married.’

  There followed a silence, broken only by the snorting of the horse, and during which the two young men looked at each other questioningly but yet knowledgeably, then turned to look again through the bracken and bramble to hear the man saying, ‘Well, that should see you through. And I won’t be seeing you again?’

  ‘No, you won’t be seein’ me again. Never!’

  There followed another silence, until the man’s voice, this time with a note of regret in it, came to them, saying, ‘That’s a pity. Yes, Lily, that’s a pity. But…well, goodbye now.’

  The men behind the hedge could see the man bend forward to do something with his stirrup before throwing his leg into the air. They saw the horse being turned and then they heard it galloping away. And when the younger one went to speak, again he was silenced, this time by a wagging finger.