Ragamuffin Angel by Rita Bradshaw

trades – was abed, and then once the others had brought Jacob into the room his mother liked to call the morning room, he had gone up to his parents.  
    Dan shut his eyes tightly for a moment and then opened them again as he glanced at himself in the full-length mirror attached to the back of his wardrobe door. He saw a soberly dressed young man in a suit and tie – a black tie, the colour his mother had insisted they all wear from now on.  
    If he lived to be a hundred he would never forget the look on his father’s face when he saw what his lads had done to his daughter’s husband, or the pandemonium that had followed seconds later when his father had had the seizure.  
    Apoplexy, the doctor had called it. A sudden inability to feel and move due to a rupture in the brain. And this pronouncement with Art and John keeping Jacob quiet in one of the bedrooms upstairs, and his mother already planning how her son-in-law’s multiple injuries came about by a fall down the steep stone steps leading from the canned and dry goods warehouse to the cellar below. His mother was a cool one all right. Dan clenched his teeth together. The thought had been neither laudatory or cheering.  
    His father had lingered for a full week before he had died, although the doctors had assured them he was aware of nothing. Jacob, on the other hand, was going to linger for a lifetime, trapped in a body that was useless but with his mental capabilities unimpaired. Damn it all . . . Dan felt himself begin to sweat. And all because one of John’s rages had got out of control. But no, no. He had to be honest with himself here. John was merely the bullet in the gun. The hand that pressed the trigger was his mother’s. It always had been, Art was right in that respect, and it had only been misguided loyalty on his part that had prevented him seeing it clearly before. But he saw it now. By all that was holy he saw it now.  
    He left the large, well-furnished bedroom quietly and stepped on to the landing, which showed highly polished floorboards either side of the blue carpet running down the middle of it. This carpeting continued down the wide staircase and into the spacious hall, but here the carpet reached the walls on all sides, which were of a dark brown and hung with many fine pictures.  
    Kitty had just closed the door to the breakfast room and the middle-aged housekeeper was dressed, as his mother had demanded, in a black alpaca dress over which she wore a starched white apron. She smiled at him now, raising her eyebrows slightly as she saw him reach into the alcove to one side of the front door for his overcoat. ‘She’s waiting for you to go in and join her,’ she whispered softly, inclining her head towards the closed door. ‘Gilbert and Matthew are already down.’  
    ‘I don’t want any breakfast this morning, Kitty. Tell her I was in a hurry, would you.’  
    ‘Now, lad, you know you’ll get it in the neck when you come home tonight. Just go in for a minute to appease her.’  
    Dan was aware it was concern for him, and not his mother, which prompted Kitty’s coaxing. The large rotund housekeeper had been part of his life for as long as he could remember, and from a very small boy he had known it was Kitty’s strong and deep respect and affection for his father, and her unconditional love for himself and his brothers and sister, that enabled the forthright Irishwoman to tolerate his mother’s fussy pedantic ways and sententious attitude. Certainly it was the only thing that had her clothed in the black dress and apron, he reflected wryly.  
    It had been eight years ago when his mother had made the decision that their social standing now made it desirable for Kitty to be so attired, but he could recall the announcement as though it were yesterday, and the squall that had followed which had rocked the household for days. But there had only ever been one possible outcome, and so Kitty had consented – albeit grimly – to