Hetty woke with a start. She was cold and wet. Disoriented, she stared up at the dark shadows of the roof, shifting to the patch where light filtered down, very little light, barely enough to lighten the gloom. Her back ached, her shoulder was painful where a pebble had been digging into it.
She was in the tunnel, the passage which led up to the house. Memory returned as a wave washed over her, making her gasp and splutter and scramble to her feet. The water was washing over the platform. Even as she watched another wave swept across it and receded. Down below, the cave bottom was awash, the mark left by previous high tides already underwater. The baby moved restlessly within her, turning. There was a small pain as it kicked her ribs. Hetty put her hand over the spot and felt the bump of its foot or knee. Something, anyway.
Straightening up, she caught the back of her head against a projection from the wall and sat down suddenly on a rock, feeling sick, letting the water wash over her feet and recede. She had to go on up. No matter how hard it was, there was no other way. The next wave might not recede at all and then there would be more. With an effort of will, she gathered herself together, got back on her feet and walked over to the source of light, the place where the tunnel led up from the platform. Somehow she had to reach the top. She was wet and shivering. Even if the tide rose no further the cold would get her, she thought.
At the bottom of the shaft, her foot slipped against something hard and though the toes were numb with the cold, the pain as she caught her little toe was excruciating. ‘Blast it!’ she shouted, bending down and feeling it gingerly. It was then that she saw, as yet another wave receded, a gleam of something … she didn’t know what. Despite the cold and the wet and the threat of the sea, she was instantly curious. She scrabbled in the sand around it and revealed a drawstring bag, a purse maybe, rotten with age for even as she tried to pick it up the leather burst and there was the chink of metal as coins fell to the floor.
Her imagination had really run riot now, she told herself, she was seeing things! This wasn’t a fairy tale, this was hard reality. A person didn’t just find treasure in a cave except in books, not even a smugglers’ cave. She was going daft in the head. Another wave came, washing round her legs as she knelt on the ground, moving the bits of leather that had come off the bag, even moving some of the coins.
Hetty was galvanised into action. She picked up the purse and as many of the coins as she could and thrust them into the pocket of her dress until it bulged then lifted more and put them on a ledge, as high up as she could reach. But the water was swirling round her knees now and she had to go. She stepped up and began to climb away from the platform.
Her knees ached. She struggled higher and higher and thought her back would break in two. She couldn’t catch her breath. There was a terrible pain in her side, the weight in her pocket pulled her down and at last she had to stop and lean against the wall of the passage. After a while she looked up at the light filtering down from the chimneys and somewhere else, she couldn’t fathom where. She was little more than halfway up. She would have to leave the coins, or most of them. She lifted a stone and hollowed out a hole with her hands for them though why she didn’t know, she was fairly sure no one came near the passage.
Climbing on slowly, taking her time, she took frequent rests, but the ache in her back was turning to a pain, recurrent, insistent. When finally she reached the door to the attic she thought she was dying. She fell on to the dusty boards and closed her eyes. The light from the skylight shone red through her eyelids, she could feel her heart racing.
Please God, she prayed, please God, let me reach the telephone. Don’t let the baby come here, please God. Susan … she had to telephone Susan. After a while she recovered enough to get to her hands and knees and crawl slowly, oh so slowly and carefully, down the stairs, pausing and doubling into a crouch when the pains came. They came ever faster, the intervals between less and less. But she reached the telephone and huddled over it, panting.
‘Come on, howay man!’ she cried into it when the operator was slow to answer but at last she heard Susan’s voice at the other end of the line. She sank down on to the floor of the hall. She could hand over the responsibility for the day to Susan now, could stop resisting and let nature carry her away. There was one more thing though, she’d almost forgotten. She delved into her pocket and found the two coins still there. She pushed her handkerchief over them, deep down in the pocket. Then she forgot all about them in the urgency of the moment.
It was a girl, not born until the middle of the night. ‘There’s plenty of time for Nurse Bainbridge to get here,’ Susan had assured her, and there had been. Next morning, as Hetty lay in the bed she had shared with Matthew, her baby in the cradle which she had brought down from the attic only a week before, she remembered the coins. Susan had gone home to see to her own family but had brought in a fourteen-year-old girl from the miners’ cottages.
‘I can manage,’ Hetty had said, but Susan had laughed.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she replied. ‘You need someone here, especially the first week.’ She had paused. ‘You can afford it, can’t you? Sylvia won’t want much.’
There was the money she had saved to make a new start for her and the baby, thought Hetty. It was then she remembered the coins from the cave. But it was so unreal, had she dreamed it? Pushing back the bedclothes, she found the dress she had been wearing, ruined with salt water now, shrunken and stained. But there, in the pocket, were the coins. Hetty drew them out and got back into bed. There was a gold coin and a silver one. She stared at them. They didn’t look to be worth much. The silver one had ‘four pence’ round the edge, and a head on it she didn’t recognise. But the gold one was a sovereign, or at least she thought it was. She had seen sovereigns before but this was very old and it hadn’t the head of Queen Victoria on it either. She rubbed it with her thumb. The date on it was 1792.
She lay back on the pillow imagining that time so long ago. A smuggler could have dropped the bag – by, they must have made a mint of money with their smuggling! Fancy ordinary working people with all that money. Or no, perhaps it was that John Andrews, the Scot who had lived at Saltburn. They said he’d run all the smuggling on the coast. Perhaps the revenue men had been after them, mebbe they had run into the cave to get away and then one of them dropped the bag in his hurry to escape the law.
Hetty smiled to herself. Sometimes the real world was more fantastic than her imagination. The smugglers must have been there. After all, there was the passage and the leather purse, rotten with age. But the money wasn’t rotten, it was here and it was Hetty Pearson who had found it.
‘I’ll make good use of it an’ all,’ she whispered to her baby. ‘John Andrews won’t miss it now.’ Penny, she’d call the bairn, after the first coin. Well, she could hardly call her fourpence now, could she? The baby whimpered and she leaned over from the bed and picked her up, cuddling her into her breast. Penny snuffled blindly into the softness, searching for the nipple.
How much was a gold sovereign worth now? She had seen some old coins in the curio shop in Saltburn. The older ones were worth a mint, they were an’ all. Penny whimpered in frustration and Hetty bared her breast and put the baby to the nipple and Penny hung on like a leech. By, it was sweet, it was. A wave of love swept over her.
‘Whisht, babby,’ she whispered, bending her head and kissing the soft down on Penny’s. ‘Whisht, babby, Mammy’s going to buy you the world.’ She laughed softly to herself. Here she was with a few old coins, she didn’t even know what they were worth, and she was talking as though she was rich. But surely she could use them to establish herself, and then she could go home and hold her head up high. She could show them the baby, and Mam and Da would fall in love with Penny straight away. She fell asleep, the baby at her breast, still making plans for the future, a future which had changed dramatically in the last few hours.
Exactly three weeks later, Hetty stood outside the curio shop in Saltburn, heart beating so fast she felt as though she was suffocating. She clutched her handbag. Imitation leather it was in dark green and some of the outside had worn, showing the cloth underneath. But inside there were the coins, or at least a selection of them. There had been pennies as well as fourpenny and sixpenny pieces, sovereigns and even guineas. Not exactly a hoard but a nice lot, Alice said when she saw them. For Hetty had thought she would burst if she didn’t confide in someone and Susan lived too near her little bay. She didn’t want anyone, not even her friends, to walk in her bay, maybe even find the cave and the passage up to the house. And Alice had been so pleased for her, not a bit of envy in her.
‘I don’t know, love,’ she had said doubtfully when Hetty said she was going to take them to Mr Martin’s shop. ‘I’m sure he’s an honest man but you can’t be too careful. Why don’t you look around? There are other places that sell such things. I’ll mind Penny for you.’
Hetty hadn’t time to look around, she needed money now. Taking a deep breath, she opened the shop door and went in. Mr Martin was a dapper little man with pince-nez and rosy cheeks. When he saw the half dozen coins which she brought out of her bag, he drew in his breath sharply.
‘But, young lady, where did you get these?’
‘I … my grandmother left them to me, they were her grandmother’s. They’ve come down in the family,’ said Hetty. Now why had she lied? she asked herself. But she knew why, she was frightened she might have the coins taken from her.
‘And now you have to sell them? What a shame.’ But Mr Martin had accepted her explanation and was examining the coins closely now and Hetty could tell he was excited about them even though he was murmuring about old coins not being worth as much as people thought.
‘I can take them into Middlesbrough, or perhaps Whitby,’ she said. She caught sight of a trade magazine, The Coin Collector, lying to one side of the counter. She picked it up and rifled through the pages, her confidence growing as she saw that there were many advertisements. People all over the country were asking for old coins! ‘Or I could write away—’ she began. But Mr Martin looked up from his scrutiny of the coins, frowning as he saw what she was doing, the frown turning to an easy smile.
‘I can see you are a businesslike young lady,’ he said. ‘But I assure you, I can give you as good a price as you are likely to get anywhere.’ When Hetty came out of the shop, she had his cheque in her bag for eighty-five pounds.
‘Well! Who would have believed it!’ said Alice when Hetty went back in triumph and, picking up little Penny, danced around the cafe, which luckily was empty, it being too early in the morning for the dinner time rush.
‘And do you know what I’m going to do?’ asked Hetty. ‘I’m going to buy a house in the jewel streets, I’m going to have my own boarding house. What do you think of that?’
‘Oh, but will there be enough?’ asked Alice doubtfully.
‘For a deposit at least,’ Hetty assured her. She was filled with a new determination. Fate had given her this windfall and she was going to do something with it, for the sake of her daughter. It was a chance, something people waited years for, and now she had it she was going to take hold of it and do something with it. And if she got as much for the rest of the coins as she had for the odd half dozen she had sold to Mr Martin, she would make about six hundred pounds. Six hundred pounds! It was a fortune, one to work with.
Customers came in and Alice was soon busy serving them. The cafe tables began to fill up and Hetty took Penny into Alice’s front room and fed and changed her. This was the time she loved, a time of communion between her and her daughter. She spent at least an hour with her, rocking Penny to sleep when she had finished. Then she took her back into the cafe and put her down in the pram. By, it was going to come in handy, that pram.
When Alice turned to her, Hetty was putting on her coat. ‘You’re off again?’ Alice asked, surprised.
‘Do you mind? I’ll take Penny. I thought I’d go to see Mr Jordan. You know, the chef at the George.’
Alice helped her out with the old deep-bottomed pram she had picked up at the salerooms the day before and watched her walk down Milton Street until she turned the corner. Then she went back behind her counter, shaking her head.
How she had worried about the girl when Mr Hutchins had told her Hetty had been turned off because he had married. She had wondered why Hetty hadn’t come back to Saltburn, though she had heard a nasty rumour put about by that woman from Diamond Street who had been her landlady. Alice didn’t believe the story anyway. She felt guilty that she hadn’t made more of an effort to find out where her friend had gone. It was obvious she had been taken down and the baby was the result. But the lass deserved a chance, she really did. Alice wished her all the luck in the world. And if Hetty didn’t want to talk about what had happened to her, then she for one wasn’t going to ask.
Hetty took the pram round to the back of the George Hotel and parked it outside the kitchen door. Penny was fast asleep so she went in and found Mr Jordan, there by the stove as she had expected.
‘Now then, lass, it’s a while since we saw you,’ he greeted her. ‘Have you come looking for a job?’
‘Not exactly, Mr Jordan,’ she answered, ridiculously grateful that he had remembered her from the short time she had worked for him. ‘I’ve come to ask for your advice on a matter of business, but I see you’re busy. I can come back another time.’
‘Business advice? What about?’ He was intrigued and showed it.
‘I’m thinking of starting a small hotel.’
‘Go on! You’re pulling my leg.’
‘No, I’ve come into a bit of money and that’s what I want to do.’
Mr Jordan studied her thoughtfully and made up his mind that she was serious. ‘Well, I don’t rightly know as I’m the one to advise you, lass,’ he said. ‘But never mind, come on, we’ll find a quiet corner and you can tell me all about it.’
They walked along Marine Parade with Hetty wheeling the pram. He never asked about the baby’s father, though his eyes had widened for a moment when he saw the pram.
He had peeped inside. ‘A little lass, is it?’ And as Hetty nodded, ‘A bonny one too.’ They walked as far as the Italian gardens.
‘I could do with the fresh air after being in the kitchen all morning,’ he said. ‘I usually take a bit of air in the afternoons.’ They sat on a bench in the gardens and Hetty told him her idea.
‘I thought just a small hotel, mebbe in one of the jewel streets. Do you think it’s daft? I was looking in the window of that estate agent’s in the square. There’s one in Ruby Street for £750. I haven’t got that but I could raise £600. Do you think I could get a mortgage for the rest?’
Mr Jordan looked out over the rose beds where a gardener was busy clipping the last of the year’s flowers. £600! It was a fortune. He had been saving all his life yet he hadn’t £600. But still, it was maybe not quite enough for what she wanted. And looking at her, she seemed no more than sixteen, her cheeks flushed with the sea air, her dark hair framing her face. ‘I don’t know, lass, I think you might be too young. But I can make enquiries for you, if you like? I tell you what, I’ll do that.’
Hetty was filled with a terrible disappointment as she walked back to Alice’s house with Penny, for Alice had said she could stay with her at least for a short while.
‘It’ll be grand having a baby in the house again,’ she had said. Her own two boys had emigrated to New Zealand and she heard very little of them. Lately the loneliness had grown worse, especially since Tom, her husband, had died last year.
Next morning, before the cafe opened at eleven o’clock, there was a knock on the door. Hetty had been bathing Penny before the fire when Alice showed in Mr Jordan then tactfully left them alone.
‘I’ve been thinking, Hetty,’ he said. ‘And I have a proposition for you.’
She laid Penny to sleep in the pram which took up one side of Alice’s small living room, thinking she would have to find somewhere else to live, it just wasn’t fair on her friend. Now she gave Mr Jordan the whole of her attention.
‘A proposition?’
‘Yes. Why ask for a mortgage? As I said, you aren’t likely to qualify, being under twenty-one. But I have a bit of a nest egg put by for when I retire and I’ve been thinking more and more of doing that lately.’
‘You mean, you would lend me the money?’ Hetty showed her surprise. Why, Mr Jordan didn’t know her that well. But he was shaking his head.
‘No, not exactly. But why can’t we be partners? I wouldn’t be putting as much in as you – say the £150 you’re short of the purchase price, plus another £200 to start us off.’
‘Eeh, I don’t know,’ said Hetty. ‘I hadn’t thought of taking a partner.’
‘No, but I’ve always dreamed of having my own little restaurant. You know I’ve a reputation in these parts for my cooking. You could run the hotel and I could run the restaurant. I know that place in Ruby Street, there’s ample room, and being a boarding house already, it must have the proper licences.’
Hetty watched his face. It was animated, full of enthusiasm. And there was no doubt he was a good chef. People came from Middlesbrough and Stockton to eat at the George. But still, to have a partner? Even Mr Jordan. Yet there were advantages to having an older man as partner …
‘What does your wife say?’
‘I’m a widower. I’m on my own completely. Look, you would be the senior partner, we could get an agreement drawn up. After all, you would be putting more money towards it.’
‘Well, I don’t know …’
Mr Jordan rose to his feet; ‘I have to go to work now. But promise me you’ll think about it at least?’
‘Oh yes, I will.’
After he had gone, Hetty took Penny out for an airing, walking down Ruby Street and looking closely at the boarding house from the outside at least. It was double-fronted, three storeys high and with imposing bay windows angled to look over the sea, though they could do with a coat of paint. Oh yes, it could be upgraded to the status of a small hotel, it could indeed. But she would need to find more extra money than she was likely to get from the sale of the coins. Thoughtfully she carried on walking, going up to Station Square and pausing outside the estate agent’s. There in the window was the notice about the house. Ten bedrooms, one bathroom, large reception rooms and kitchens.
It was the place for her, she knew it. Turning the pram round, she walked down to Marine Parade and the George Hotel. As she went, her imagination streaked ahead of her.
She was already planning what she would do with the place, how she would make it more attractive than any other small hotel. She would put in another bathroom as a priority, maybe handbasins in the rooms if the budget would run to it. Pearson’s, she would call it. Just that, no fancy names. And Mr Jordan would make the restaurant famous too. And who knows? Pearson’s might be just the first of many such hotels, maybe a hotel in each of the jewel streets, and Penny would never, never have to go to place in some strange house where she was treated worse than dirt. Her daughter would have the best of everything.
Hetty laughed at herself as she turned into the side of the George Hotel. By, it was good to have a dream but it was even better to have the means to make that dream come true! Or at least to make it take shape.
Mr Jordan was working hard, putting the finishing touches to plates of hor d’oeuvres. He looked up and his hand, holding a piece of lettuce, stayed in the air.
‘Well, lass?’
‘It’s a deal,’ said Hetty.