PART TWO

Blackburn, 1921

Mags, Harold and Betsy

Hard-Hitting Truth

Chapter Eight

The day of the wedding – the first Saturday in February – the sun shone weakly through a haze of cloud. Its warmth wasn’t enough to melt the hard frost that had bitten during the night. Mags thought everywhere looked beautiful as she gazed out of her window.

‘There, lass, you look grand.’

Betsy had dressed Mags’s hair. Getting ready together had added fun to the proceedings, and Mags was glad there was no atmosphere that spoke of Betsy’s dissent concerning her marriage.

Betsy had accepted that Mags’s love for Harold was so strong that she felt she could surmount the problems they’d had. Mags didn’t know how to reconcile that with what Betsy had been through at Harold’s hands, but as Betsy was coping and was happy for her, she tried not to think about what had happened and decided never to refuse Harold again. Surely then he wouldn’t feel the need to stray?

Her mind recalled all that had transpired in the ten days since her visit to Harold’s house. Doubts crept in now and again. To allay them, she had taken steps to secure her future. Her mother’s will had revealed a family secret. It appeared that her mother had an old friend, an Irishman, whom she’d met as a girl. They wrote often and, when he died, he left his house in Portpatrick, Scotland, to Mother. He’d left Dublin by boat because of the growing unrest there and had found sanctuary in a house from which he could still see his beloved country across the water.

When Mags tackled her father on the subject, it seemed Colm Shangly was a bone of contention between them – not for any reason other than that her father was jealous of the attention Colm had received. Now, shamefacedly, her father admitted that he had been a fool. ‘My darling Belinda never expressed a wish to visit Colm, or even to visit the house left to her, but they seemed to have so much to say to each other. Reams and reams of paper came from him, and Belinda used to sit and giggle as she read through them. Always when you were out of sight, my dear. You see, they met when she was a girl and she visited Dublin city. I had this notion that they fell in love. Maybe they did. But she loved me more, I know that. I’m sorry now; really sorry for the way I was so petulant, and for not letting you know of his existence.’

Mags reassured him that none of it mattered now.

The Scottish property now belonged to Mags, as did the legacy of a substantial amount of money and her mother’s jewellery. Mags had sworn her father to secrecy about it all, telling him it was to be her insurance policy, if anything happened in the future that meant she needed to take care of herself.