Free Ruby McBride by Freda Lightfoot Page A

seemed to be half-hourly intervals throughout the long days and nights.
    ‘Oh, Pearl, do please shut up. We’re all hungry and tired. Your constant complaining doesn’t help.’ Ruby grew increasingly afraid, felt exhausted much of the time, as well as freezing cold, her clothes never quite drying out from one rain shower to the next. And, worst of all, Billy began to cough.
    They slept in doorways, under railway bridges or in back alleys, with nothing to cover them but dirty sacks and any old newspapers they found lying around. Sometimes even this relative shelter would be denied them by one or other of the marauding gangs who roamed the area and proved to be far less obliging than Kit’s lot. So they would move on, further and further away from the territory they knew well.
    One night they were trailing sadly about under the labyrinth of railway arches and the Bridgewater Viaduct that spanned Castlefield, the slap of water in the nearby Rochdale Canal hardly noticeable above the rumble of trains thundering overhead. Somewhere in the distance a whistle blew. No doubt a gang leader calling his lads together, a common enough practice. Ruby paid no heed. She felt light-headed with hunger and fatigue, shivering with cold, and was desperately searching for a safe place to sleep which wasn’t already occupied, or wouldn’t leave them vulnerable to intruders   when a figure stepped out from behind a pillar right in front of them. Ruby’s heart seemed to leap into her throat.
    `What way is this to treat a friend, to buzz off without so much as a goodbye?’
    She flung herself into his arms and kissed him full on the lips. For a precious moment Kit responded and she felt herself held tight and warm and safe, his body hard against her own. She was a child still, yet somewhere, deep inside, the woman she was to become stirred into life and Ruby became all too aware of the masculine scent of him, the warm strength of his young body. And she recognised too, in that magical moment, that he was equally aware of hers.
    He let her go abruptly, with a casual shrug of embarrassment, avoiding direct eye contact as he thrust his hands deep in his pockets, as if keeping them from further mischief. ‘I don’t know where you thought you were going, rushing out of Salford like that, but you don’t seem to be making much of a job of it.’ His scathing glance took in the bedraggled appearance of the other two, and Ruby gave a sheepish smile.
    ‘We don’t have your skills.’
    He gave a slow smile that turned her heart right over. ‘Then you’d best come home with me and have some more lessons.’  
    Whether she would have gone with him or not, Ruby was never to discover. At that moment Charlie and Clem, who had obviously been acting as lookouts, burst upon them like a pair of harbingers of doom, falling over each other to speak.
    ‘It’s the Coal Wharf Gang, they’ve heard we’re on their patch.’
    ‘Scarper!’
    Before any of them had time to think, let alone make a run for it, they were set upon from every direction. Fists and clogs were soon flying, shouts went up, blood flowed, teeth were broken, jaws cracked. Ruby grabbed Billy and Pearl, her one thought to protect them, and the three clung together, shaking with fear, as the battle raged between the two rival gangs. It was terrifying to watch, and the fear she felt for Kit and his lads grew, for they were seriously outnumbered.
    Then a shout went up. ‘It’s the rozzers!’
    ‘Look out, they’re after you, Kit, and mean business.’
    But it wasn’t Kit the police were after, at all. The three McBride children were suddenly plucked from behind the arch where they were hiding, and found themselves caught up in the arms of the law.
    They soon learned that Sister Joseph, having remained obstinately persistent throughout these long weeks, had pestered her tame constable to keep a lookout. So it was that on this night when sheer exhaustion had driven the children out into