“I hurried across the street to help, and I was able to grab him, surprised like, and hold him tight. He fought me, but he finally stopped and curled into a ball right there in my lap. His head and his ankle was bleeding, and his knees was all skinned up from his fit.
“There were people stopped to watch the spectacle, and a constable finally come and helped us get him home. The constable said Duncan were mad and needed to be in a hospital or foundling home. It weren’t the first time someone had told Abigail that, but she sort of got stuck on the idea that they would all be safer if’n he were in a place like that.”
Hazel knew the sort of home Delores was referring to—a home for orphaned or abandoned children. Disabled children, like she had been, were often abandoned at such places. They lived in poverty and often died young due to poor living conditions. The thought of Duncan being taken to a place like that made Hazel’s throat tight. The image of a child hitting his own head against the cobbles because he could not sort his feelings or express them was no less disturbing.
“The conversation he overheard in the cupboard was about him being sent to a foundling home, then? Not getting rid of the dog,” Hazel summarized. Her stomach felt heavy. “And when Leon would not agree, Abigail left.”
Delores nodded, looking at Hazel now. “She only meant to stay with me a few days. She ha’ not slept well in weeks and was still awful sick.”
“Sick?”
A guilty look crossed Delores’s face.
Still awful sick. Unable to pick up Duncan.
“She was pregnant,” Hazel said.
“It dinna help her to think too straight,” Delores said, still defensive. “She’d planned to stay with me a few days, get rested, and then go back and talk to Leon.”
“Leon knew where she was?”
“’Course,” Delores said. “Where else would she have gone but to her sister’s place on the other side of town?” She paused and looked at the table again. “But a few days turned into a week, then two. Leon started comin’ ’round and askin’ when she was comin’ back. The baby inside her got growin’ bigger, and her worries grew with it.”
Hazel groaned in her throat, picturing the five-year-old wild boy banging his head on the cobbles and kicking his mother away. She closed her eyes and swallowed tears for the impossibility of the situation. “What did Leon say about her staying away?”
“He was none too happy about it, he cunna work, what with no one to look after Duncan, but it were his baby too in Abigail’s belly. He left each time he visited without knowin’ how to fix things.” She paused for a breath.
“After a few weeks, I made her start helping me in the bakery. She needed to be doin’ something, and we’d lost one of our girls. Even with that big belly, she was a pretty thing. She caught the eye of one of the customers, and they got to talkin’ and such. I dinna think too much ’bout it other than it was nice to see her smilin’ again—she had a beautiful smile.”
Delores began drawing circles with her finger on the table. “One morning, she dinna come down to the bakery, and when I went to look in on her, she was gone.”
The compassion that had been building in Hazel’s heart began to sour. “She left with this man?”
“I dinna know,” Delores said, the defensive edge returning to her voice.
“She didn’t leave a note?” Why would she not leave a note so her family would at least know what she’d done?
“Abigail dinna write,” Delores said, wrinkling her nose. “Not all of us got fancy schoolin’ like you did.”
Hazel blushed, embarrassed to have assumed. Duncan’s mother, raised forty years ago in a small port town, would not have had the opportunities Hazel had been given. Like the parish girls she’d been teaching these last months, Abigail had been raised to work—In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.
“But you eventually learned where she went.”
“More than a year later she came to the bakery, her husband and baby in arms.”
“Husband?”
Delores pinched her lips together. “Her man took her to a new place where no one knew ’em, and they claimed they was married. Everyone thought him the father of the child, and Abigail, well, she was happy and, so while I dinna take to her lyin’ like she did, I could see why she done it.
“By then, Leon had taken up with Catherine, and Duncan was doing better. I think Abigail’s sadness had made things worse for him too. Leon was angry with me, o’course, and then one day he came to the bakery and said he and Catherine were takin’ Duncan to Ipswich. He’d a friend from the navy who was gunna help him find work there, and Catherine’s uncle had a place where they could live that would make things better for all of ’em.
“Catherine were teachin’ Duncan to read then, and Leon was so proud o’that.” She smiled sadly. “He said maybe the trouble all along was that Duncan needed learnin’ to fill his mind. Catherine wrote to me now and again, telling me how they was, which is how I knew where they lived back then—my daughter would read me the letters. Catherine told me of Leon’s dyin’ and, as my husband had died too and I’d lost the bakery for it, I came to Ipswich. My daughter were married then and dinna need me no more. I thought I might could help Catherine some with my nephew and get a new start for my own self.”
“Leon and Catherine didn’t marry because he was still married to Abigail.”
Delores nodded, obviously uncomfortable with that part of the situation. “I’d thought they’d tell a lie like Abigail and her new man had done, but they dinna do that. Duncan was twelve years old when I come to Ipswich and smart as anyone I’d met. I worked at a bakery the first couple of years but then hired on here when they was lookin’ for a woman ’cause Catherine was sick, and I thought it best to be close by.”
Hazel did not know what to say for several seconds. She wanted to hold tight to morality and fairness and doing what was right. But what was right? Certainly, Abigail should have stayed and learned to deal with her son, but she’d been pregnant, and Duncan was physically aggressive. Could Hazel hold it against her to want to protect the unborn child?
Running off with another man was also wrong, and yet Abigail leaving had opened a place for Catherine to step in and make important changes in Duncan’s future. Neither of his parents were educated; what would have happened to him if he’d never gone to school and learned how to use the beautiful brain he’d been given?
Catherine. Hazel felt tears well up in her eyes. She still didn’t understand what had brought the youngest daughter of the fourth viscount of Howardsford from London to Manningtree to take up with a married shipyard worker and his strange son, but she’d changed Duncan’s life. She’d stayed even after Leon died.