Ragamuffin Angel by Rita Bradshaw Page B

had been seconds too late, but then the eyes opened and two orbs of a startling deep violet-blue stared at him. ‘Me feet are stuck.’  
    ‘What?’  
    ‘I think I’ve slipped in a ditch an’ me feet have gone through the ice an’ they’re stuck in the mud,’ said Connie matter-of-factly.  
    ‘Right.’ He didn’t have time to marvel at her stoicism, that came later, but once he had dug and dug and uncovered most of the small form he found that her feet were indeed stuck fast in the glutinous mud beneath the ice, and that she had sunk to above her calves. It was her instinctive raising of her arms in front of her face that had saved her and formed a pocket between the suffocating white mass and her upper arms, but she was cold, very cold. She wouldn’t have lasted much longer.  
    Once he had pulled her free and lifted her up into his arms her tininess became all the more poignant, and he found himself raging in his mind against the adults who had allowed so small a child to venture forth in such dire conditions. These people! You wouldn’t send a dog out in this. Something his mother had said recently when she’d been on her high horse with his father came back to him. A family had been begging for bread at the back door, and the mother’s and children’s feet had been bare and bleeding and the lot of them clothed in rags. His father had happened in the kitchen as Kitty had been sending them away with a loaf and some cold brisket and cheese, and he had fetched some old clothes and a couple of pairs of boots that he, Dan, had outgrown, and handed them to the snotty-nosed little urchins. His mother had been furious, absolutely furious, insisting that they would immediately be taken to the pawnbrokers and the money used to buy beer and tobacco for the man and woman.  
    ‘They don’t want to rise above their squalor, that’s what you don’t understand, Henry,’ she had stated coldly. ‘They wallow in it, their hands forever stretched out as they shun honest toil. They don’t think like us.’  
    It was one of the rare occasions he had heard his father raise his voice to his wife, and in the heated exchange that had followed, when his father had reminded his mother that both he and she had come from working class stock and he – for one – was proud of the fact, Dan’s sympathies had all been with his father and the destitute family, but now he wondered if there hadn’t been a grain of truth in his mother’s declaration.  
    He glanced down at the child in his arms. ‘Right, we’d better get you back to your mother and get you warm.’  
    ‘I can’t go back home yet, I haven’t bin to the farm.’  
    The small figure wriggled but the last had been said through fiercely chattering teeth and Dan didn’t relinquish his grip. ‘Nevertheless, home it is.’  
    ‘You put me down, you!’ A small part of Connie’s brain was acknowledging that she wouldn’t have got out of the ditch without this lad helping her, but a larger part was telling her he was one of them – one of them that had caused all the nasty things that had happened – and now her struggles became frantic as she began to beat her small fists against his chest and yell, ‘You! You! It’s all your fault. It is. Me mam’s bad an’ the babby’s dead an’ it’s all your fault.’  
    By the time Dan got to the cottage he had got the gist of what had happened, but nothing had prepared him for the freezing cheerless interior of the tiny dwelling place, or the sight of that drawer with its pitiful package, and he was to remember the feeling, as though burning coals had been heaped upon his head, for the rest of his life.  
    Raw emotion was tearing at him as he ran as fast as he could to the farm, thrusting a handful of coins into the farmer’s wife’s hands and telling her to get fuel and food to the cottage while he went for the doctor, and it was still with him in all its searing intensity when he struggled into