"Bill, Dear I'm confused." Lottie asked brushing her apron, adjusting the third mug for tea. "Who is this woman again, and why is she coming to my house?"

Lottie was not averse to guests, she had just accepted that her front door was permanently open these days, the house bursting at the seams, but Bill had been so casual, so flippant, so offhand about this guest. There had been lots of moustache twitching when this was broached.

Of course he got the full inquisition as soon as he walked into the kitchen. Didn’t even get a chance to sit down.

Bill had just sent the last of his children off. John was mercifully out on his own accord. Ruth away as a maid. He had surprised Joe and Pearl (and everyone else) with train tickets to spend a day in Scarborough to make up for their lack of a honeymoon. And now Kate had been given Bill’s beer money to take Anne Ward out to see the Magic Lantern show in Silver Street.

He took his time, pulled out a chair slowly. Sat down. Twitched his moustache again. Made a low rumbling noise as he sighed. “I didn’t want to say it in front of the bairns. My sister, Jane, is in Whitby. She would like to meet you.” There. It was out. He wished that was all he had to say for the rest of the afternoon. He feared it wasn’t.

Lottie blinked and took a breath as if about to say something, then she stopped and scowled.

"What took her so bloody long?" she blurted. With raw opinion in the open, the truth continued to flow from her mouth

"The nerve of the woman, it's been twenty feckin' years, and now she shows up? Ye don't even like those people, ye never talk of those times back then. Why now? What is she these days, the Queen of Sheba?"

Bill flinched under her outburst. He wished she would just keep her mouth shut. What did she really know, anyway?

He laid his hands on the table and stared at his thumb. "Well, I'm the one that ran off, innit?" he pointed out. He spotted a small hangnail beside his thumb nail and began to pluck at it. "Me old man is dead." He plucked away with steel intensity.

Lottie's rant abruptly de-railed.

"Oh Bill. I'm sorry luv." Lottie answered softly. She placed a calloused hand over Bill's, pausing his fidgeting. In all the years she'd known him, Lottie believed Bill to be the strong and silent type. But obviously he was human, he did have feelings. "Was it sudden?" she asked, silently recalling how her own relatives had kept death waiting out of spite.

Bill's fingers stopped, then moved out and over her hand to hold hers between his. He avoided looking at her but his hands gently squeezed hers in gratitude. "She wrote to me before. Told me 'e was sick. Och, I just didn't know what to do with it, Lottie. Yer man's a coward. I kept thinking, maybe I'll go next week. Maybe I'll go next week. I just couldn't. And what with everything goin' on. I suppose it's better. I would 'ave only brought pain and chaos into their lives. 'E wasn't a bad man, ye know. 'E deserved to die in peace." His chest felt like it was about to explode.

Lottie's breath caught in her throat. It was hard for her to see him brought low by emotion. Her Bill was a granite slab of a man, strong, solid, and reliable. Yes, at times he was a maddening fool, but he was her fool: spending too much of his wages down the pub, coming home grumpy, giving the boys too rough a go about the choices they made. The list of his faults was long... but then there were his good qualities: letting baby Kate play with his moustache while she sat on his lap, working extra days to put a nicer dinner on the table at Christmas, playing cricket (in the house!) with the boys when they were little. In Lottie's eyes, Bill's positives were many.

She hadn't seen her father-in-law in decades, even if she only imagined meeting him at all. For her husband, his past was like a suit of ugly clothes that was never worn, stored only out of guilt, until it was mercifully thrown away. As for cowardice, what a lie. Would a coward have pulled a scared, desperate, and lost young woman out of the path of the oncoming express train? She'd always be grateful to him for that.

"Ye shouldn't blame yeself," she offered quietly. "Yer not a coward, Bill. Ye never have been. Ye saved me, remember? Yer always been my rock. This is just... a shadow. And we'll get through it. Together."

Bill finally looked up at her from under his bushy eyebrows. What had he ever done to deserve such a beautiful woman? Strong as the Whitby piers amid crashing waves she was, but warm and inviting as the kitchen she ran so skillfully, fiercely protective of her own as a lioness. With a few words, she had caught his spiralling grief and bandaged it. He remembered how fortunate he was. For now, that was enough. Not to take away the sorrow, but to keep insanity at bay. He squeezed her hand gently.

“I rather think you saved me,” he said. But she was right. He had also saved her.

He had noticed Lottie when he first came to Whitby. From under the arched doorway of the railway station, he would watch her, broom forgotten in his hand, as she weaved through the hustle and bustle on the quay, carrying wicker skeps and baskets for her father. She was slender, but strong, with curves in all the right places, which made her gait seem like a dance to him. When she stopped to talk to the fishermen or laugh with her friends, sunbeams always seemed to find her and her red hair dazzled in the light like a wordless spell; he was bewitched. And when she passed close to the station, he could see that she had a lovely face, round with rosy cheeks and laughing eyes. He had thought she had to the prettiest lass in all of Yorkshire.

He had bought fish until he couldn’t stand the smell of cod anymore, just so that he could talk to her. Her answers were always polite but brief and it never led to the animated chatter he had seen her have on the docks. She didn’t seem much of a talker with him. Bill had blamed it on his own inability to keep a conversation going. He had spent his entire adolescence in the harsh, lonely, and highly structured environment of first prison and then the reformatory. He could get dressed in under a minute, knew how to salute, and had gained some useful skills in woodwork, but other than knowing how to throw or dodge a punch, he hadn’t really learned how to interact with other human beings in all those years – let alone girls. He had spent the time since his release trying to catch up, but he had found that he wasn’t much good.

This hadn’t discouraged him, however. He had gone to local dances in the hope of finding her there so he could ask her to dance. When he finally did get his chance, she had said ‘alright', but without much enthusiasm. He had noticed how she rolled her eyes at her friends when she got up, and how they sniggered in reply. As they danced, he struggled once again to keep a conversation going. She had made no effort, looking over his shoulder at other young men, instead. That was when Bill had finally gotten the memo: She was too good for him. He should have known, really. She was one of the most desirable girls in her community: pretty, warm, hard-working, sensible, her family well-respected. There was a queue of young men eager to win her over as their wife. And he was an outsider, twice over: not from her community, and not even a Whitby man. As far as the outside world was concerned, he had no family or connection, no history. Just a penniless stranger, a lowly, railway porter, who didn’t know how to talk to girls. If she hadn’t rejected him, her father would have.

Then she left town to work in a factory somewhere up north, or so he had gathered, while he managed to be apprenticed as a fireman. He had almost forgotten about her, when one day, a few months later, he and his colleagues had found her on the tracks, They had taken her back to the station. His colleagues had scolded her for her recklessness, but he had brought her a cup of tea and had offered her his soot-laden jacket against her trembling. He had heard her out.

He had laid the offer out before her in a frank and pragmatic manner. He was only an apprentice. He didn’t really have any money right now. Had a room in Baxtergate that wasn’t suitable for raising a family. They’d probably have to live with her parents for a while. He wasn’t in touch with his own family, so there was no money to be expected from that direction. And she had to know this: he had spent several years in prison and the reformatory for an attempted garrotte robbery he had committed at eleven. That was as much as he told her. She was not ever to ask for more details, and she could never tell anyone. He had only told her, because she needed to have all the facts before she made up her mind. But if she’d accepted him, despite all of this, he promised to love and respect her, acknowledge her child and bring it up as his own, and always provide for her as well as he could. There would be more money once he was a fireman. A decent, steady income. And he didn't drink much. He'd take it straight to home every week. He could save up for one of those newer houses in Fishburn park.

Three weeks later, they were man and wife.

Bill lifted her hand to his lips and gave it a prickly kiss. “’E would ‘ave liked ye.” He swallowed, trying to get rid of the lump of grief in his throat for meetings that could never happen now.

Lottie smiled softly, her eyes fixed on Bill and his mustache. Though he had kissed her countless times, it was still like being kissed by a stable broom, a bristly, familiar warmth. Theirs was the love well worn with time to a buttery softness, a deep comfort that settled into her bones, unlike Bill's mustache.

Their meeting on the railway track, in the very pits of her despair, was burned into her memory second by second. The air then had been thick with the acrid smell of coal dust and the harsh, scolding jackals of the other workers. Amidst it all, Bill had simply strode in, a solid presence against the chaos, and scooped her up. He’d wrapped his soot-stained coat, smelling faintly of grit and engine oil, around her shivering shoulders as her distress poured from her in ragged sobs. He listened as she blurted that her life was ruined, that she could never go home again, that she was now fallen and stupid. She had built her life around the word of another, that he loved her unceasingly, that he had promised her the world. But back in reality, all she possessed was a steaming mug of strong tea and the quiet, unwavering gaze of a compassionate railwayman. Memories changed quickly.

"My mam couldn't stand ye, remember?" Lottie added wistfully. "Said if I wanted to be covered in soot, I'd do better weddin' a coal scuttle. She had me paired with young Ned from the 'Three Boat' Bellows' lot, bless his simple heart. Da thought ye were solid as oak though."

“Ned’s a good man,” Bill said graciously. In fact, he had spent decades hating Ned. Only now that Ned had been married some twenty years with grown up children of his own, had Bill forgiven the poor innocent for the late Mrs. Clark’s schemes.

As for Lottie’s parents, he had felt uncomfortable around both of them. Mrs. Clark had made no attempts to hide her dislike of him. She had treated him like an impoverished relation who had overstayed his welcome. It had made living in that house very difficult and had caused considerable friction between the young spouses. Mr. Clark had treated him with surprising kindness (after telling him that he would kill him if he ever broke Lottie’s heart, which Bill had agreed to). But Bill had shared none of the old man’s easy warmth. His own manners were formal and stiff. He had talked to the man as he would to a headmaster or a boss: respectful, correct, impersonal, only speaking when spoken to. He couldn’t recall interacting with his elders in any other way. And anyway, he had always been aware that Mr. Clark would never have accepted him for Lottie if he knew the truth about his past. Every interaction with him had felt like a lie and so he had kept the man at an arm’s length. Lottie had begged him to tell her father the truth, or to let her tell him – it wouldn’t make a difference, she had said – but he had forbidden it and reminded her of the promise she made. The secret had made her feel ill at ease, alienated from her family, and that too had caused friction between herself and her husband.

And now, once again, his past had caught up with him to create yet more havoc. Would it ever stop? He rubbed his thumb over the back of Lottie’s hand. “Perhaps yer mum was right, though,” he muttered. “Ned doesn’t have an ugly past to come an’ wreak havoc at any time…” Today, that history came in the shape of his sister, who refused to bugger off.