Cinderella Sister Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Dilly Court

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Lily Larkin is the youngest of six and the least important member of her family. With their father dead and their mother a stranger to them, she must stay at home and keep house whilst her elder siblings go out to work. As she goes about her daily chores, her head is full of dreams. And she longs for the day she can have a life of her own.

  When a fire threatens to destroy the nearby docks, Lily’s act of kindness towards a handsome foreigner has disastrous consequences for the whole family. For shortly afterwards they are thrown out of their home and have no choice but to move into two mean rooms above the fire station where Lily’s brothers work. Here the family struggles to make ends meet. But just when things might be looking up for them all, Lily makes a terrible error of judgement. In anger her eldest brother turns her from the door. Forced onto the streets, Lily wonders if she’ll ever see her family again…

  About the Author

  Dilly Court grew up in north-east London and began her career in television, writing scripts for commercials. She is married with two grown-up children and four grandchildren, and now lives in Dorset on the beautiful Jurassic Coast with her husband and a large yellow Labrador called Archie. She is the author of thirteen novels and also writes under the name of Lily Baxter. To find out more about Dilly Court visit her website at www.dillycourt.com

  Also by Dilly Court

  Mermaids Singing

  The Dollmaker’s Daughters

  Tilly True

  The Best of Sisters

  The Cockney Sparrow

  A Mother’s Courage

  The Constant Heart

  A Mother’s Promise

  The Cockney Angel

  A Mother’s Wish

  The Ragged Heiress

  A Mother’s Secret

  For Hilary Johnson and Margaret James, with thanks.

  Chapter One

  Shadwell, London, November 1880

  Lily had been too busy wrestling with the mangle in the outhouse at the rear of the old dockmaster’s house to pay much attention to the weather, but pausing for a moment to brush a lock of damp hair from her forehead she sniffed and wrinkled her nose. She could smell it and taste it even before she stuck her head out of the door and saw the telltale strands of pea-green fog creeping over the brick wall into the back yard. It curled like a sneak-thief’s fingers around the men’s shirts and underwear as if it were about to pluck them from the washing line.

  She sighed and arched her aching back. She hated Mondays. If she ruled the country she would make it illegal for women to spend the whole day slaving over a copper filled with boiling water and strong-smelling lye soap. She would put a stop to the drudgery of mangling, rinsing and then mangling again before the clean garments could be hung out to dry.

  She had been slaving away since dawn, and with the sudden change in the weather came the knowledge that the washing would not dry in time to be ironed that evening. Her brothers would have to wear soiled shirts beneath their firemen’s uniforms for another day at least, and they would not be happy about that. Then there was Nell, her eldest sister who taught at the Ragged School in George Street; she would grumble bitterly if she did not have a clean white collar and cuffs to keep her grey poplin blouse looking spick and span until Friday. As for Molly, Lily’s senior by one year – well, Molly was a trial at the best of times. As Grandpa Larkin said, Molly would try the patience of a saint; she was unpredictable as the weather. She was like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead: when she was good she was very, very good and when she was bad she was horrid. Well, Lily thought, grinning, Molly was not that bad and she certainly wasn’t horrid, but she had inherited the Delamare temperament from their artistic mother. Molly worked as an apprentice silk handkerchief dyer for old man Cobham in Sun Tavern Place, and she invariably arrived home with her clothes splattered in rainbow hues, most of which were impossible to remove.

  Lily cranked the handle a little faster, feeding the wet garment through the giant rollers with care. She had learned from bitter experience that getting her fingers caught between them was something to be avoided at all costs. Why, she wondered, was life so unfair? Having been born the youngest of six she was expected to stay at home all day and help to keep house while her elder siblings went out to work. Her time was not her own. Of course they had Agnes to do the cooking, but she was more like part of the family than a servant and she was getting on in years. Her fingers were gnarled with rheumatism and her legs were corded with varicose veins, which she was pleased to demonstrate whenever anyone asked her to do anything that she considered to be above and beyond the call of duty. This included washing, ironing, scrubbing floors and beating what was left of their threadbare carpets on the washing line. Changing the sheets and bedmaking also came into this category, although each of the Larkin children had been brought up to do this for themselves. It had been many years since the family could afford a domestic to do the mundane chores, and these had gradually been heaped upon Lily’s slender shoulders.

  If only Ma had stayed to raise the family she had borne so easily and then carelessly abandoned, but she had run off with an artist, or so Lily had gathered from the whispers that had circulated at the time. That had been ten years ago, and at the age of nine Lily had been considered too young to be told the truth. Some years later Molly had informed her in a fit of temper that she was no better than their mother, who had spent her time painting pictures instead of looking after her children. Ma, she said, had wasted money on art lessons, which culminated in her leaving home to live with her lover, which had created a scandal that had tainted all their lives. According to Agnes, to whom Lily had gone begging to be told the whole story, the man in question had been a louche fellow from an upper class background who should have known better. Lily had no cause to doubt Aggie, who had worked for the Delamare family since she was a girl of fifteen and had been a surrogate mother to the Larkin girls after their mother abandoned them. Lily had spent what was left of her childhood living in a dream world she created in her head. She made up stories about her French antecedents having fled to England in a desperate bid to escape from the guillotine, although Aggie cast scorn on such notions and said they had been Huguenot weavers and not at all high up in the social strata. Lily had not been convinced. She remembered sitting at Ma’s knee, listening to tales of wealth and family fortune, sadly lost. Ma had been a bit of a storyteller, but she had been beautiful and she had smelt as fragrant as a rose. Sometimes when Lily was tending to the gnarled rose bush in the tiny front garden, the scent of the red damask roses made her think of Ma, and it always made her cry.

  Everything had changed after their mother’s sudden flight. Pa had always been a remote figure, spending more time at the fire station than he did at home. Less than a year after Ma left, he had be
en killed in an inferno that had razed the gutta-percha warehouse to the ground.

  The melancholy notes of a foghorn brought Lily back to the present. The yard at the rear of the dockmaster’s house was being gobbled up by the fog. The gathering gloom had a yellow sulphurous cast to it and the air reeked of soot. Unless she was very much mistaken a real pea-souper was on its way. Very soon she would not be able to see a hand in front of her face and it would become difficult to breathe. She abandoned the mangling and hurried out into the yard, tugging at the garments on the washing line and dropping them into the laundry basket. Wooden clothes pegs flew in all directions but she did not stop to pick them up. The washing was already speckled with smuts and large flakes of ash had begun to flutter to the ground like black snow. She angled her head, taking small breaths of the foul air, and her worst fears were confirmed. There was a new and more alarming smell polluting the atmosphere – the acrid odour of burning timbers.

  Fire – the word sent shivers down her spine. Her three elder brothers had followed the family tradition by joining the London Fire Engine Establishment. Lily had never managed to accustom herself to the gnawing anxiety that filled her heart and soul whenever they were on a shout. She sometimes wished that she was a man so that she could accompany them and not be the one left waiting nervously for their safe return. Hefting the wicker basket into the scullery, she set it down on the deal table by the stone sink. She was about to close the back door when she heard the clanging of a bell and the thundering of horses’ hooves as the fire engine was driven pell-mell down Labour in Vain Street. That could only mean one thing. The fire was too close for comfort.

  Abandoning the washing, she ran through the maze of passages that had once been the servants’ domain in the days when Grandpa was dockmaster and a man of importance. But that was long ago and now he was retired and had to exist on a small pension, a fact that he never allowed anyone to forget. Lily was only too aware that the house had seen better days. The walls were in sad need of a lick of paint and plaster flaked off the ceiling to coat the worn tiles like fallen snow, but she was in too much of a hurry to pay any attention to details like worm-eaten skirting boards and missing banisters on the staircase that curved gracefully upwards from the once elegant entrance hall.

  She tried to open the front door but the wood had swelled with the damp and she had to put her foot on the jamb and tug with all her might until it finally gave way with a groan of rusty hinges. She stepped outside and sheltering beneath the tiled portico supported by wrought iron pillars, she peered into the gathering gloom. The dockmaster’s house was built on a promontory at the old Shadwell entrance to the London Docks. On a clear day she would have had a good view upriver as far as Sharp’s Wharf and downriver to Limehouse Hole, but now she could barely see to the end of the garden path. She could hear the water slapping and sucking at the stone wall and the mournful moan of foghorns from across the water, but as the sound of the fire engine’s progress grew fainter she was enveloped by an eerie silence. The London particular had the city and river muffled and bound, imprisoned in a thick noxious blanket of sulphur and smoke.

  Lily had not stopped to collect her shawl and she wrapped her arms around her slender body in an attempt to fend off the cold and damp. She stood very still with all her senses alert. She strained her ears for the all too familiar crackling sound of burning timbers and cries of alarm, and through a thick curtain of fog she could just make out a faint red glow in the sky above the river. She held her breath, listening for the reassuring clang of the second fire-engine bell and the accompanying sound of horses’ hooves. If it was a large conflagration there was certain to be a second appliance sent from the fire station situated in a converted beer shop in Cock Hill. As soon as the call was raised, her brothers would have donned their brass helmets, fire tunics and boots and climbed aboard the fire engine. Even now they would be hanging onto handles fixed to the body of the horse-drawn vehicle as it sped through the streets towards the scene of the pending disaster. It would only take a few minutes to reach the wharves where the fire might have started in one of the many warehouses or the steam mill, or even on board one of the ships moored alongside.

  She did not have to wait long and as the second fire engine rattled past the house she was seized by the sudden need to follow it and see her brothers at work. She picked up her skirts and ran down the path, letting herself out of the gate and racing along Lower Shadwell Street. The pall of smoke and fog was making it increasingly difficult to breathe, and she covered her mouth with her hand. When she reached Bell Wharf the swirling, stinking miasma above the river was as red as a blood orange. She could just make out the burning hull of a large vessel on the foreshore where it lay stranded like a beached whale. At the top of Bell Wharf Stairs she came across a small crowd of onlookers, mostly women from the flour mill a little further upriver. Their clothes, hair and eyebrows were coated thickly in white dust, giving them a ghostly appearance, but their anxious chatter was drowned by the shouts of the watermen, dockers and seamen who had formed a human chain to take water from the river and hurl it into the centre of the inferno.

  Lily realised that their efforts were being directed by her eldest brother, Matt, whose stentorian tones drowned even the loudest of the other male voices. Without stopping to think of her own safety, she made her way down the slimy stone steps to the foreshore. Holding up her skirts she stepped over the stinking detritus, weed-encrusted stones and muddy pools where shards of burning timber floated, hissing and spitting out sparks.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here, Lil?’

  She turned with a guilty start and found herself staring into the soot-blackened face of her brother Luke.

  ‘I just wanted to make sure you were all right,’ she said defiantly.

  ‘Go home, Lily. This is no place for you.’

  She hesitated, gazing helplessly at the blazing timbers of the schooner. ‘I can hear Matt but can’t see Mark.’

  ‘He’s working the pump and hose. Now get out of here, there’s a good girl. We’ve got enough to do without worrying about you.’ He smiled and his teeth gleamed white in his dirty face.

  ‘Look out there.’ Matt’s voice carried over the water.

  With an ear-splitting crash the main mast of the vessel snapped off and fell into the river, sending up a plume of spray as it hit the seething waters of the Thames. A cloud of steam engulfed the ship and firemen alike, and there was a moment of chaos as men stumbled about blindly in their attempts to dodge baulks of burning timber.

  Lily did not know why she had come; something had drawn her to this particular conflagration which was beyond her understanding, but she knew that Luke was right. There was nothing she could do and she would only be in the way of the men who were struggling to prevent the fire from spreading to ships tied up at neighbouring wharves and the warehouses filled with valuable goods. She was about to leave when she saw a smoke-blackened figure struggling towards her. His pea jacket was smouldering and his whole body was racked by a fit of coughing. He was limping badly and seemingly unable to control his gait he barged into her, almost knocking her off her feet.

  ‘I – I’m sorry,’ he gasped, as his knees buckled and he sank to the ground, very nearly taking her with him.

  ‘No harm done,’ Lily said, making a vain attempt to raise him to his feet. ‘Please try to get up and let me help you to the steps. It’s too dangerous to stay here.’

  He gazed up into her face, but another fit of coughing robbed him of speech. Flaming spars had begun to fall about them like a shower of meteors, but Lily couldn’t bring herself to abandon him. She looped his arm around her shoulders. ‘You’d best make an effort or you’ll end up roasted like a hog on a spit.’

  Somehow she managed to get him to his feet and slowly and painfully they made their way to the steps, but he stumbled and fell to the ground. ‘Alas, my ankle – I think it is broken.’

  He closed his eyes, lapsing into unconsciousness, and Lily stare
d down at him in dismay. He was not a big man, perhaps a little over medium height and slightly built, but she would not be able to get him up the steep flight of steps unaided. ‘I’ll get help. Wait there.’ Even as the words left her mouth she realised it was a silly thing to say. In his present condition, the injured man was going nowhere. She raced up the steps, almost bumping into a burly fellow who was on his way down. She peered at him through the choking pall of smoke and fog. ‘Is that you, Bill Hawkins?’

  ‘Lily?’ He leaned forward, squinting at her through the sulphurous haze. ‘What the hell are you doing here? Get on home, girl.’

  She had known Bill all her life. He had worked on the docks since he was little more than a boy in the time when Grandpa had been dockmaster. Now he was a big, broad-shouldered foreman in the London Docks, but he still took tea with Grandpa every Friday evening after work, keeping him informed of the goings-on in his old stamping ground. Lily clutched his arm. ‘There’s an injured man down there, Bill. I think he’s broken his ankle and he’s soaked to the skin. I can’t manage him on my own.’

  He glanced at the burning wreck. ‘All right,’ he said slowly. ‘Looks like there’s nothing much I can do to help the boys. Where is this chap?’

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me down.’ Standing on tiptoe, Lily kissed his bewhiskered cheek before retracing her steps to where the man lay on the muddy foreshore. She tried to rouse him but Bill laid his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Leave him be, Lily. It’ll be less painful for him if we do it this way.’ He bent down and hefted the injured man over his shoulder. ‘C’mon, fellah, we’ll soon have you put to rights.’

  It took them some time to make their way back to the dockmaster’s house and visibility was so poor that Lily had to keep stopping to make sure that Bill was following her. It was almost completely dark now and Lily had to fumble to find the doorknob. She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Bill.’