She stood in the doorway until he had opened the little gate at the end of the yard and entered the back lane, returning his wave before she shut the door, her heart thudding as though she had run for miles. After turning the key in the lock and sliding the bolts across, she walked over to Betsy, lifting her out of the highchair and holding her close.

‘You’ll grow up knowing exactly who your da was and how much he loved you,’ she said with a soft fierceness. ‘And I’ll never give you up, no matter what happens.’ She would die before she let anyone take her child away; whatever it took she would keep them together. She wasn’t stupid, she knew it wasn’t going to be an easy road, but the toughness of her formative years in the workhouse had prepared her for this, she told herself. Some girls of her age had been spoiled and cossetted their entire lives but she’d always had to stand on her own two feet – until she met Davey. Then, for the first time, she’d felt loved.

She settled Betsy on her lap for her last feed and as the baby began to suckle she pictured Davey in her mind: his blunt, good-natured face, his easy laugh, the way he’d look at her as though she was the only woman in the world – and she had been, for him. She knew that. Had he known what his love had meant to her? She doubted it, for how could you explain to someone who had been brought up in a family, a respectable family with a mother and father, how the stigma of the workhouse penetrated your mind and soul? How the matron had daily reminded her and the other bairns like her that they’d been born in sin and as such were unclean, shameful? The lowest of the low, even among the inmates of the workhouse.

She took a deep shuddering breath, the sick feeling that had been with her since childhood and which had faded on marrying Davey gripping her again. Past slights and humiliations flashed through her mind and she gave a little whimper deep in her throat before telling herself to stop thinking. It was Vera O’Leary who had stirred this all up and she wouldn’t give Davey’s mother the satisfaction of bringing her low. She wouldn’t. Davey had given her his name, she was Rose O’Leary now, not Rose Potts, a bastard child to be scorned and ridiculed, and Betsy had been born within the sanctity of marriage and in the sight of God. Her bairn would never be called workhouse scum or be spat at by other children or made to feel worthless. She would make sure of that. Whatever faced them in the future, she would make sure of that.

Chapter Seven