The Bells of Scotland Road by Ruth Hamilton

been ‘looking after’
Bridie’s father for donkey’s years . . . ‘You’ve gone from one slavery to another. You won’t even have a field for your children to play in, Bridie. Young ones round
here are wise before their time. It’s a pity you came. It’s a pity I didn’t get the chance to warn you.’
    Panic paid another brief visit to Bridie’s chest, but she dismissed it. For better or worse, she was a wife once more. ‘’Tis done now,’ she told her hostess. ‘No
use looking back and dwelling on what might have been. If my mother had lived, if Da had been a better man, if you had written to me . . . We can’t live while we keep looking back all the
time.’
    Diddy dropped her head in tacit agreement, chewed on her thoughts for a few moments. ‘Sam Bell’s not a bad man,’ she pronounced eventually. ‘And he’s not a good
one, neither. Like the rest of us, he’s got his faults.’ Light was beginning to break in the rear of her mind. Horses. Some snippets of conversation were weaving themselves into the
thin curtain that separates the conscious from the subconscious. ‘The horses came about a month ago,’ she volunteered thoughtfully.
    Bridie half smiled. ‘Ah, yes. They would be ferried across in good weather and on quieter tides. He takes great care of his beasts. Da’s famous for his horses.’
    ‘Some were sold on.’ Diddy clasped her hands tightly in her lap, as if trying to restrain herself. Given a chance, she would have clobbered Sam Bell and Thomas Murphy there and then.
‘Two were kept with the gypsies. There’s a stallion and a mare. The gypsies have been walking them miles and paying rent for fields where they could run about a bit. They’re
frisky, like. Specially the grey stallion.’
    ‘Racers,’ said Bridie. She ignored a flutter of excitement in her breast. Were Quicksilver and Sorrel here? Would she see them again?
    ‘What?’
    ‘They’ll be racehorses. Arab–Irish are the best.’
    Diddy eased herself out of the chair. ‘Would you like a drop of ale?’
    ‘No, thank you.’ Bridie had never tasted strong drink.
    ‘Cup of tea, then?’
    ‘It’s late. I must go and see to my children.’
    The older woman laughed. ‘Our Tildy’s the best baby-minder in Liverpool, queen.’
    ‘All the same, I’d rather—’
    ‘Come on then.’ Big Diddy Costigan forced her size seven feet into the size six shoes picked up from St Aloysius’s rummage sale. ‘We’ll walk round to the stables
and get your so-called husband to take you home.’
    Bridie hesitated, forced herself to remember the letter. Sam Bell had promised not to trouble her except where the shop was concerned. She didn’t really want to think about bed, could not
encompass the idea of close contact with a man she had only just met. And he was old, with a terrible cough and thinning hair and a very dirty kitchen table.
    Of course, there would be the cleaning, shopping, cooking, washing and ironing; there would also be his mother to tend and the girls to mind. Those things were a woman’s lot, part and
parcel of the institution called marriage. Compared to all those chores, the part-time running of a shop promised to be easy. If only he would give her a room of her own. She clenched her fists
into tight knots and prayed that he would not touch her.
    Bridie sat slumped in the midst of disaster and wondered whether she would ever be sane again. The walk from Dryden Street to Newsham Street Stables and thence to Bell’s
Pledges had been interesting, to say the least. The actual stables had been closed for the night, so Bridie had been denied the chance to see the two horses. She and Diddy had spoken to the gypsy
whose husband owned the business, had been told that Sam and his companions had left some time earlier.
    Flashes of what Bridie had seen outside kept leaping before her mind’s eye like cinema film that jerked its way over sticky spools. She had brought her children into a place of