He began walking swiftly, his deep blue eyes glinting in the dying sunlight, and now he was thinking of nothing but the meal he was going to have at the inn followed by a night with the barmaid. The glade in the wood, the body of the young lad who lay beneath the earth, didn’t weigh on his mind, nor did he give a thought to the heartache the boy’s loved ones would endure in the weeks ahead when there was no sign of him.

It had been round about the time the nightmares about Davey had ceased that he had begun to feel the power in himself and realize how the attitudes and viewpoints of society kept people in mental chains. But not him. No, not him. You had to make things happen in life. Most folk were like sheep, weakly following what was expected of them, and they had no one to blame but themselves when they ended up miserable and disappointed. He was different. His mother had accused him of becoming hard recently but she didn’t understand that you had to take life by the throat and shake it into shape; only then were you invincible. While you took notice of society’s laws and morals, you were just one of the herd. He was above that. And the more he had understood he was special, the more the power inside him had manifested. He always got what he wanted. And he wanted Rose . . .

PART THREE

The Baker’s Shop

1908

Chapter Sixteen

From where she was still snuggled under the covers, Betsy lay listening to the clatter of boots outside the house. The men were making for the ironworks, she knew that, which meant it wasn’t six o’clock yet. It was dark outside and bitterly cold but she was as warm as toast in bed, although she knew the moment she poked her nose out of her cocoon the bedroom would be like an ice-box, last night’s fire nothing but cold ashes in the tiny grate. The clippy mat beside the bed gave brief comfort from the freezing linoleum floor covering her mam had put down over the floorboards; although the lino looked nice, it always seemed colder than wood in the winter.

She shut her eyes again, revelling in the fact that it was a Saturday and there was no school. Not that she minded school, she admitted, in fact she liked it, and at least she could come home for lunch. Her two best friends, Flora and Sally, had to stay and they were always moaning that there was nowhere to eat the sandwiches and cold tea they brought with them because they weren’t allowed to sit in the classroom. There was the porch, but the stone floor was freezing to sit on and the children who were lucky enough to sit on the pipes never moved until the bell went for class.