The Harrogate Secret (aka The Secret) Read online

  THE HARROGATE SECRET

  Catherine Cookson

  Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  The Harrogate Secret

  PART ONE One

  Two

  Three

  PART TWO One

  Two

  PART THREE One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  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

  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 publish
ed 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 Harrogate Secret

  The Harrogate Secret is a tour de force of historical imagination, a story with an enthralling plot, thick with the intertwining stories of richly drawn characters, and a brilliantly detailed portrait of the oppression of the poor by those who reaped the rewards of the British Empire. But most of all, this is a story of romance.

  Born into grinding poverty, ten-year-old Frederick Musgrave spent his childhood living by his wits. Agile in mind and body and never more so than when navigating his little boat across the swift-flowing waters of the Tyne between the busy seaports of North and South Shields. The shillings he picked up running messages and smuggled goods, evading the ever-watchful eyes of the customs agents, helped to feed his family amidst the endless battle for survival fought by so many in this year of 1843.

  But one night a mission took this small runner to the house at The Towers, where madness had been known to lurk, and there he witnessed a scene of unremitting horror. His silence was bought and the tide of his life shifted. He gained the patronage of Miss Maggie Hewitt, the middle-aged sea captain’s daughter who was to play a major role in shaping Freddie’s life and fortunes as he grew to manhood.

  But years later the madness at The Towers again threatens, and Freddie must once more rescue his hard-won happiness and security from cruel fate and escape the long shadow cast by Roderick Gallagher, whose power and influence threatened all who crossed his path.

  The Harrogate Secret is one of Catherine Cookson’s most powerful and ingeniously devised novels, a tale rising to a suspenseful and exciting climax.

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1988

  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 978-1-78036-049-2

  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 HAPPENED WHEN I WAS TEN

  One

  Robert Musgrave eased himself off the low platform bed set in the alcove and, using his arms, propelled himself backwards across the stone-flagged floor towards the door of the cottage. In doing so he had to pass between the open-hearth fire and the two small children playing on the mat in front of it, and the back of his wife who was standing at the table in the middle of the room. When he reached the door he lifted up one arm and pushed the sneck; then with a practised fling he swung his two useless legs to the side in order to allow himself to reach the top step, and there he sat for a moment, looking out.

  In the fading light he could still make out other cottages dotted here and there on the steep hillside down to the row of dwellings that bordered the shore.

  But as clustered as the cottages were on this part of the hillside, Robert often thanked God that he was housed here and not further along the hill in the main town where the principal winding street on the bank of the river ran from Low Lights to the Bull Ring, and from which led numerous sets of steps, some counting up to a hundred, and these giving on to the houses on the hill.

  Situated as the cottages were here, the wind coming from the river and the German Ocean did sweep away the stink; but along there it was so congested with the muck and the human offal lying in the streets that in parts they had to wait for the pigs to swarm in in the mornings to clear it for them.

  Something should be done. He had said this for many a year. Cats buried their mess and the scorned pigs chose their places to empty themselves, but human beings seemed to wallow in their own excrement; yet the fine ladies and gentlemen could emerge from their big houses on the top of the hill and step daintily over muck without blinking an eyelid.

  ‘Sitting on your bare backside on a cold step is not going to bring him any quicker; he’ll come when he’s ready.’

  He looked back into the room towards his wife. She wasn’t looking at him but concentrating on the coarse flour and water dough she was kneading on the table.

  ‘He isn’t runnin’ the night,’ he said; ‘he saw the faggot man the day and got no word.’

  ‘He could have sculled across the river to South Shields, the tide’s low.’

  ‘Aye, but for only another half-hour or so. That’s what’s worryin’ me.’

  ‘Well, it shouldn’t. He’s been caught afore by it an’ he’s gone to his gran’s. What’s different the night? What’s the matter with you?’

  She turned from the table, dusted her hands on her coarse apron, then went towards the door. She was a big woman, all of five foot eight and broad with it, but her width was made up of bone and muscle. Providing for her family since the day, ten years past, they had carried her man in, his legs bloody and dangling, had kept the flesh stripped from her. At times, even now, she could still hear him screaming, not with pain, but at the doctor who had wanted to cut his legs off.

  He’d always had a dread of having no feet. In bed on their wedding night he had laughingly told her he had one fear in his life, that he would lose his feet. And on that occasion, such was their enjoyment of each other she had tickled his soles and caused him to squeal.

  The bone man from along the coast had pushed the bones back into the torn flesh, the while she held him down and Jimmy Harper from next door poured rum down his gullet. So he had kept his feet and the bones had knitted, but not quite as nature intended: his feet were splayed and his legs useless from the knees down.

  As if tending a child, her hand went to his head and stroked the straggling hair from his brow, and he put his own up and laid it on top of hers for a moment, pressing it tight, and his voice quiet as he asked, ‘Why do you never seem to worry about our Freddie?’

  ‘Because I know nothin’ will ever happen to him.’

  ‘Because he’s small and slippery?’

  ‘No, no, not that. And he’ll grow: he’s nearin’ the time for growin’, they sprout after ten. No, it’s because he’s got things in his head. He’s somehow like me dad used to be,
sees things that are comin’, and I feel that this’ll always help him to keep clear.’

  Still gazing ahead, Robert smiled quietly to himself. He wanted to answer her: ‘It didn’t stop your dad from being picked up by the press gang,’ for then she would have likely come back, saying, ‘No; and it didn’t stop him from escaping them, although it took him two years.’ And she was right about Freddie. He was a lucky lad, picking up a tanner here and there and more at times. And then there was his job at the butcher’s from where he often brought home a pile of chitterlings; and he was lucky an’ all in that his mother wouldn’t let him go down the pit. Aye. Aye; not like John. John was down there now in the dark. My God! If ever there was a hell it was down that pit.

  John was twelve now. He had been down since he was eight. But on that first night down he wasn’t the only one who had cried, for he himself had lain wide-eyed following every move that would take his lad into the depths. He himself had gone down as a lad of seven, clinging to a man’s waist, the man himself clinging to a rope and being lowered into the black hell. When he was fifteen he realised that a man could become depraved doing such work. He hadn’t put it under the heading of that word then, he only knew something in himself protested against his body being used so and his mind being sullied.

  Then when he was twenty he got his eye on a lass, just caught glimpses of her now and again, a big strapping lass. It was her hips he noticed first. They swung her thick serge skirt from side to side as she walked. She was only fifteen or so but already a woman and from her hair to the toes of her steel-capped boots she was strong. She was working in the saltpans at the time, but her people were fisher folk from across the water in South Shields. Her name was Jinny Williams. He had courted her and married her and loved her, and she had loved him, and she still did. Strange that, him a useless cripple; yet not quite useless, for hadn’t he made all the furniture in this cottage, and wasn’t it the best and cleanest comfortable cottage at this end of the hill?

  It was she who had got him to leave the pit and go into the shipbuilding. They were turning out ships by the dozen on both sides of the river then, and within ten years he had become as good a carpenter as any man who had been apprenticed to it from a bairn. It was during this time he had built the little sculler for John, no bigger than a coracle it was, and it would hold two at a pinch. But it was odd, John never took to it; he didn’t care for the river, would rather walk the countryside. No; it was Freddie who, from when he was able to toddle, would tumble into it; and he was sculling like the best of them when he was four, and seemed never to have been out of it since. And it had stood him in good stead. By, it had!