She had shaken her head and inched a little away from the fire. This had seemed to anger him, for with a heave he had shifted his bundled body close to her and, thrusting the neck of the bottle at her mouth, said, ‘Get it down you; you’re no company for a man.’
When she had remained stiff and staring he had gripped the back of her hair that hung in two thick brown plaits down her back and, jerking her head back, he had thrust the bottleneck into her mouth, and as she choked and gulped he had laughed and kept at it.
That was one of the nights she made her memory skirt around …
But now it was February and they were on the road again. They had passed Corbridge and the ruins of Lang Lonkin’s Castle. He said he was cutting over to Harlow Hill, making his way to Ponteland through Dalton, before coming down into Newcastle. That way he could clear his stock.
He would tell her all this as they were going along, not looking at her, his gaze directed between the horse’s ears. He’d explain their route and why: there was some good grub to be got from an old wife near Harlow Hill; and all the lasses in the Hall up near Ponteland had the fancy for a bit of jewellery. It would seem he talked to her, yet all the time she knew that he was just telling himself where he was going. But what he never voiced was the length of time he would be staying at any one place, because this varied.
But this time he did not go on the route he had planned. It had rained solidly for a week, the roads were quagmires. He took the direction away from Harlow Hill and made for Wylam, meaning to follow the road above the river to Newburn, then straight on into Newcastle. He grumbled aloud that he’d miss a lot of good custom, but consoled himself that he’d pick it up on the way back with a well-replenished stock from the city, and he said to her on this day of rain and raging wind and leaden skies, ‘You can have the bairn there in the town; I know a wife who’ll see to you.’ He let a while elapse before he asked her, ‘What do you want, a lad or a lass?’
She wanted neither. Oh Lord, Lord, she wanted neither. She didn’t want to see this thing that had been growing inside her and who would look like him, ugly, distorted. But when he said, ‘Well, I’ll make your mind up for you. If it’s a lad you can keep him, if it’s a lass I’ll see to it,’ she had shuddered, then clutched at the mound of her stomach.
But they didn’t reach Newcastle; they didn’t reach Newburn. The rains became heavier and the roads impassable, and he made for a resting place before they reached the toll bridge. ‘Over the hill down yonder’—he pointed—‘there’s an old barn. It’s weathertight at one end. We’ll get the lot in.’
When leading the horse round the hill to the barn, which was situated about a hundred yards from the river, he saw it was half under water. He cursed and turned the horse about and, lashing it into effort, drove it back the way they had come.
When the darkness came on they were forced to stop, and their only shelter was a stone wall. He drew the cart alongside it, took the horse from the shafts, tethered it near some sodden grass, then peering in all directions through the grey haze of the rain he said, ‘Bugger me! For the first time in me life I don’t know where I’m at.’
The following morning Kirsten woke, dead weary, stiff, cold and sodden wet, to an almost forgotten sight, the sun was shining. Its rays were weak and not warm but the rain had stopped and the clouds had lifted and there was a little comfort in promised dryness.
Much to her surprise he did not go on to Newcastle that day, or the next. On both days he went rabbiting in the afternoon and did not return until the light was fading. Then on the third day he moved them back down the road and into the barn, which was now free of water for the river had gone down. Just as he had said, it took the cart an’ all.
The big gaping hole from which the doors of the barn had long rotted, and the equally rotten thatch of most of the roof’s length let in the wind and rain. But at the far end, except for the gaps between the timbers, the barn retained some of its original solidness and only the floor was wet.
It was fine for three days and when Hop Fuller went on his mysterious rabbiting missions she walked along by the edge of the swollen river which was still covering its banks. Her body was heavy, and weary and once or twice she thought it would be quite easy to lie in the water and just drift away. At times she thought of what he had said should the child be a girl, and she hoped it would be and she would be rid of it. But this thought was always followed by the indefinable sensation of guilt.
It was as she stood looking across the fast-flowing water where, to the left of her, was a stone wall that gradually disappeared into the water, seeming to emerge at the other side and ascend a steep hill, that she saw a man walking along the inside of the wall. The man kept close to the wall, stopping and looking at the top of it here and there. Then he came down to where it stopped at the water’s edge. His face was a blur in the sunshine; she could only see that he was tall, and felt that he was young. At the same time she was thinking it was a funny way to wall a field, on both sides of a river. The shape of the wall and the appearance of it, dark in some parts, white in others, looked like a set of teeth, as if a river giant were biting into the land.
The thought of the river giant, like other strange thoughts she’d had lately, lifted her back into the past to hear a voice telling her stories: ‘And the river giant was angry, and he swelled out his chest and his breath turned into water and burst over the banks and flooded the land, sweeping all before it.’ Odd phrases recalling a woman’s voice, a woman’s smile, a woman’s touch.
And the voice coming at her across the river now was like that of the river giant himself, for it bawled, ‘What are you doing over there?’
‘What?’
‘What are you doing over there?’
‘I…I was just takin’ a walk.’ Strange to hear her own voice linking words together without hesitation.
‘I wouldn’t go any farther.’ The man’s hands were round his mouth now, trumpeting. ‘It’s boggy. And watch the river; the debris is mounting up near the bridge.’ He took one of his hands from his mouth and pointed along the bank in the direction of the toll bridge. ‘It isn’t over yet, there’s more to come.’ He now pointed to the sky, and she nodded and called. ‘Yes, yes, thank you.’
They were looking at each other, he from under his hand spread over his brow now, and she with her head up looking directly forward, for he wouldn’t be able to make out her eye from this distance.
She turned away and walked in the direction of the barn, and when she looked again towards the enclosed field across the river he was no longer there.
Numerous times during the day she told herself that she had spoken, she had spoken to someone, spoken ordinarily, naturally, and she had done it while holding her head up. There were wonderful things in life if one could only do them, wonderful things, such as talking. She had never known before how much she wanted to talk…
Hop Fuller didn’t come back until the darkness was well set, and he didn’t bring a rabbit from his inner pocket, so she knew something else would go into the shaft.
It was as she drank her second mug of hot tea that she felt the first pain. It checked the liquid in her throat, then brought her mouth into a wide gape and the tea spurting out of it and right across Hop Fuller’s face.
As he showered her with oaths his hand was raised but didn’t come down on her for she was huddled in two over a sack on the barn floor.
When she straightened up he was still wiping his face, and he muttered, ‘You’ll have to hold it till the morrow, can’t travel the night. Anyway, it’s started again.’ He thumbed towards the high dark roof on which the rain was pattering; then, looking at her again, he said, ‘There’s bound to be an old wife who will see to you. If not, it won’t be past me to do the job.’
At his words her stomach became taut and she rose and stumbled towards a pile of boards stacked against the wall of the barn and lay down.
She had no more pains and after some time she dropped into a troubled
sleep in which she dreamed that the wind was raging and the waves of the sea were roaring in her ears and she was about to drown, and in her sleep she told herself not to worry, for this is what she wanted; this was the best way to die, a clean death, for the water, however murky and mud-filled, would be clean in comparison with the breath that had wafted over her night after night. Let the water take her.
But the roaring of the enraged water increased until she put her hands over her ears and tossed her head from side to side and so woke herself up. Blinking through the thin dawn light, she gaped in utter amazement at the water rushing through the cracks and holes of the barn and swirling and struggling to get out of the entrance, only to be held in some check by a pile of debris.
The noise about her was deafening, terrifying; the water was flowing over the planks on which she was lying. She struggled to her feet and clawed at the side of the barn to steady herself, and looked to where Hop Fuller was lying in the cart, which was held in a horizontal position by means of the shafts being thrust through holes in the barn sides.
He had drunk long and steadily last night and she had finally gone to sleep to the sound of him singing. She screamed at him now, ‘The water! The water! Hi! Hi!’ But her voice was as ineffective as a sparrow’s chirp against the thunder of the wind and the strange roaring sound all about her.
Letting herself down into the water that came above her knees, she shuddered and trembled as she fought her way to the cart and there, putting her hands on him voluntarily for the first time, she shook him by the shoulders and brought him awake.
After sitting up with a jerk he became still for a moment at the sight before him. When he took a leap from the cart and yelled at her she didn’t know what he was saying, not until he tried to pull the shafts out of the holes, then she understood and struggled to the other side of the cart and added her weight to his. But tug as they might they couldn’t dislodge the shafts, for the whole structure of the barn seemed to have tilted and was jamming them down.
She had thought that it was impossible for the noise to get louder, but when the barn was suddenly wrenched from its hundred years’ mooring and the supporting timbers reared upwards before throwing off the remaining canopy of the roof, her eardrums were split by the sound. The only sense she seemed to have left was her sight, for her body was so numb with cold that she could not feel her hands gripping the cart shaft, and smell and taste were as senses she had never experienced, even with the muddy water flowing into her mouth.
Like the tin toy she had once seen a child playing with in a street in Maryport from which two men spun outwards when the child twisted a knob underneath, now she and Hop Fuller were whirling madly round like those tin men, each clinging to a shaft of the cart as the whole of it twisted and dipped, stopping only when it was checked by a floating cow, or a hen cree, or, at one time, what looked like the roof of a house. The strangest thing of all was that the ends of the shafts still supported a part of the barn, with a stanchion attached and hanging from it; a patch of rotten thatch waved above them.
How long they clung to the revolving shafts of the cart, how far they went, she had no idea, but there came the moment when she knew she couldn’t hold on any longer, her time had come to give up. And it was in this very second that the upright beam fell over. She saw it coming, and Hop Fuller saw it coming. She didn’t scream, she couldn’t; her mouth, her throat, her stomach were filled with water; but she saw him scream. She could tell by his mouth that he screamed. She saw the beam come down on his head and split it open like a child does a walnut with a stone. She saw his body rise right out of the water as if he were going to walk upon it. She saw his blood colour the river and the racing debris, she saw it colour the low sky and spread and spread. She imagined it spreading over the whole world, her world, right back to Maryport. Then he went down and she knew he was no more, and because he was no more she hung on, and the cart continued to whirl and whirl; sometimes it whirled so quickly that her body spun outwards like the tin men. Then of a sudden it stopped whirling and rushed, flanked by the carcases of two cows and a young foal, straight ahead down the middle of the river.
She didn’t know when she stopped moving, but at some point she became dimly aware that she was in a mass of bodies, dead bodies, animals’ bodies, and the young foal was still with her, its head now lying across the shaft towards the broad end.
The wind was still roaring, but she seemed to have got her hearing back for it was whistling through her head and with it a voice screaming, ‘Hang on! Hang on!’ She looked along the shaft that was now at an angle and attached to the front part of the cart only and this piece was resting on top of something that was itself resting on top of something else, and above all this there was a great branch of a tree and along it a man was crawling. When he reached down and thrust out his hand she was unable to grip it. She made no attempt to try, she just stared up at him, her eyes wide, unblinking, as if her upper lids were glued back.
When she saw him step down into the debris she wanted to warn him, but she had no voice. Then his arms were about her, under her armpits pulling her up. The bulge in her stomach, as it came in contact with him, almost toppled him into the water. She saw his mouth open as if he were shouting, and to his call someone else came along the branch, and she felt herself being hauled upwards, then dragged along the tree trunk, and the broken branches scraped her thighs, but she felt no pain. She closed her eyes and remembered no more.
PART TWO
THE ROPEMAKER
One
They carried her up out of the deep water, the young man and the old one, but all the way to the house they were walking through water. The water covered the meadows, it covered the parkland and the farmland running alongside, right through the ornamental gardens of Faircox Priory, where it had flooded the cellars on the east side and was now in the kitchens on the north side.
Before they reached the courtyard Colum Flynn, the young one, and not of this house at all, said to Art Dixon, the first coachman, who was of the house and had been for sixty years, ‘Where are we to put her?’ and the old man said, ‘In the loft; she’ll be dry there and she won’t trouble about that for she’s of the road, you can see by her clothes.’
‘Aye, yes.’ Colum nodded down at the head drooping over his arm, at the dead white face, the long eyelashes looking as if they had just been drawn on the cheeks, the paint still wet. Part of her hair still remained in plaits and swung with his every step, as if she herself were walking jauntily. Their Kathie’s hair, he commented to himself, swung like this when she aped the ladies in her games. This one looked little more than a child herself, not much older than Kathie’s eight. But that couldn’t be. She was a young woman, well gone towards her bed, and that would likely be empty for the child would surely die after this.
As they splashed across the courtyard, the neighing of the horses in the boxes mingled with the wind and Art Dixon said, ‘They’re worried, an’ there’s one in there who’ll start kicking down his stall afore long if it rises any more.’
‘Where’s everybody?’ Colum asked as they went through a wide-open door and slithered over sodden straw towards a ladder leading to a platform, and the old man put his foot on the rung of the ladder and bent his head and drew in long gulps of breath before he answered. ‘Oh, they’re over at the farm salvaging the stock. But it looks as if Bury has lost most of his by the animals that have come down the river.’
‘Well, he should have brought them inland, he could read the sky.’
‘Aye, I suppose so; but it had gone down with these three fair days. Deceiving it was.’
‘Huh! Deceiving! An idiot could have gauged what was going to happen if he had gone up by the bridge yesterday, the debris there, and the water piling up beyond it. No, Bury like the rest of them would be too busy with his drink, it being market day, to take note of the bridge or the sky.’
‘You’re a hard young fellow, Colum.’ The old man’s words were softened by a smile. The
n he added, ‘Well now, let us get her up above. Will I go first?’
‘No, I will. Push her from her feet, your hands under her soles.’
‘Well, there now, up you go, you poor mite.’ Art pressed Kirsten’s limp feet upwards, then mounted the ladder and a few minutes later they both stood looking down at the humped form lying on the straw, and the old man now said, ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if she snuffs it.’
‘Nor me either…She should be seen to, I suppose?’
‘Aye. Well, as soon as Mrs Poulter gets back from the lodge I’ll get her over. She’s got all the lasses away. They were scared; naturally after the business five years gone, although little Mary Aitken would have died sooner than most for she had the weakness on her. However that might be, she died after standing in water for nigh two days, bailing it out. It might have ended there but her father, being an agitating pitman, tried to make something out of it: sweated labour—wet sodden labour in poor Mary’s case. Any road the lasses are scared, and Mrs Poulter got them over to the lodge, for the mistress wouldn’t have them upstairs, at least Miss Cartwright won’t. But it strikes me she’ll regret it an’ be glad of help afore long for the mistress could be on her time an’ all. She isn’t due till next month, the end of it, but she had a pain this morning. Still, it could be as Mrs Poulter says, fright ’cos of the floods; there may be nothin’ to it. An’ I hope to God not, for the doctor’ll not get through, nor yet Betty Sayers. An’ the master’s not due back till the day after the morrow, and if anything should go wrong with this one…’
‘That would be just bad luck, wouldn’t it, an’ him betting on being third time lucky!’ Colum laughed and Art turned away and made for the ladder, saying, ‘Don’t be bitter lad, he has his points.’
The Slow Awakening Page 4