Lucy looked around her. She rarely visited Keighley, and she didn’t care for it. The people were different; even though she lived only a few miles away, you could tell they were from the town. People might be poor where she lived, but they had pride and you could tell that by the way they kept themselves clean and tidy. In Keighley a lot of people were dressed in rags and were begging on the streets. There was poverty knocking on most doors and the workhouse was always threatening. Back home was more rural, with folk eking out a living from the land, spinning and carding wool in their rooms when the weather stopped them from working outside, and making ends meet by growing whatever they needed to survive. Keighley town was not a friendly place to a country girl, so she would make her purchases and then find Adam. Even the temptation of some money to spend could not persuade Lucy to stay.
She looked at the list and at the money that Adam had put in her hand, and decided to walk down Church Street to Chatburn’s, a shop where she knew she could buy most of the items on Adam’s list. And then she would visit the butcher next door and wend her way down the street, turning off at the corner of Russell Street to where the sheep fair was being held. Standing outside Chatburn’s, she looked in the window at the advertisements and goods displayed there, smiling at the advertisement that said, ‘Brides’ cakes and funeral biscuits made here on the shortest notice.’ One minute you could be getting married and the next dead, just like Thomas Farrington, she mused. And then she got back to the job in hand.
The shop was filled to the rafters with jars containing pickles and jams, spices, sugars and flour, and the air smelled of freshly ground coffee beans from an elaborate, gleaming brass-and-red coffee-grinding machine that stood on the counter top, with a notice on it declaring it the best coffee in Yorkshire. Lucy waited for the woman in front of her to be served, then stepped forward and gave the rotund moustached man in a white apron her list and watched as he read through it. Her eyes were taking in the counter at the other side of the shop, where cakes and biscuits were displayed so beautifully that it would be hard for her to resist their temptation, if she was to wander over to that side of the shop.
‘Aye, we have all that’s on your list. Do you want it now, or will you be calling back for it?’ The shopkeeper looked at her and could see Lucy’s fascination with the coffee beans in the glass dome of the coffee-grinder.
‘I’ll be calling back for it later in the day. Can you tell me now how much I owe you?’ she asked, and waited while the man totted up the totals.
‘That’ll be two shillings and threepence. Are you paying now or when you pick it up?’
‘I’ll pay now, but can you add an ounce of your freshly ground coffee to the order as well, as I’ve never drunk it before?’ Lucy enquired.
‘It’s not on your list. Will you not get into bother for adding it?’ The man looked at her.
‘No, Mr Brooksbank said I could treat myself, so that’s my treat.’ Lucy grinned. She had never drunk coffee, and she could share it with Adam the next day.
‘Well, as long as you’ll not be in any bother. That will be another tuppence on top.’ The shopkeeper held out his hand to be paid and shook his head as he passed her the change. These young maids, they’d take the shirt off your back, if they thought they could get away with it. No wonder his well-to-do customers were always moaning about their thieving servants, he thought as he watched Lucy go out of the shop, without a care in the world.
The butcher’s next door had a newly slaughtered pig hanging by its splayed back legs beside the shop’s entrance, its ribs open to the world and blood running down its snout into the gore-filled gutter below. It was a smell of death and blood that Lucy was used to at the flay-pits, where they were constantly moving animal hides. She walked past it and entered the butcher’s shop and looked around her for the coming week’s meat supply. With not much money left, she’d have to be careful, so she opted for some pig’s liver, calves’ feet, tripe, sausage and a good portion of shin of beef with some kidney. She’d make Adam a nice steak-and-kidney pie, which she thought would feed him two days and would be a real treat. She paid the butcher and made the same arrangement to pick the meat up later in the day.
With her shopping now done, Lucy wandered down the line of shops, stopping to admire the shoes in W. Town’s shoe shop, which were advertised as the latest style in American overshoes; and looking at the window in the next shop, J. Naylor and Son, which advertised, ‘Teeth extracted in between selling cigars and snuff’ – along with various other new inventions and needs that the good people of Keighley required, on her way to meet up with Adam. Her mood was light and she hummed a tune while she walked amongst the townsfolk, with her shawl around her shoulders and her head filled with the return journey home with Adam, in his new donkey-cart. She was foolish, she knew, even to think about her master in that way, but her heart was beginning to rule her head and even the slightest glance or
