When Jim entered the bedroom, with a bowl of gruel and milk on a tray, Riddler was sitting up in bed.
‘Is this all I get? Pig-slops again?’ he said, as he received the tray.
‘H’mm,’ Jim said, surveying him, ‘you are better, obviously.’
‘Yes, if you thought to be rid of me, you’ll have to wait a while longer yet.’ Riddler motioned him to a chair. ‘Meanwhile you can sit and talk and watch me feasting myself,’ he said.
Later, Jim and Kirren ate their own supper, sitting opposite one another at the kitchen table, in the golden circle of light from the lamp.
With the curtains drawn close over the windows, against the cold wet night outside, and a good fire burning red on the hearth, they were shut in together in comfort and warmth and because they had the kitchen to themselves and sat there together in strange new special intimacy, the room seemed somehow to take something from them, of wonderment and discovery, and to give it back again in waves.
Knowing that Riddler was now asleep, they talked together in quiet voices, and everything they said to each other deepened the intimate feeling between them.
‘If we were not already married, would you marry me?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Ours was a strange wedding,’ he said. ‘Surely no other two people can ever have married in such a way, knowing nothing about one another, caring nothing, as we did then.’ And after a little while he said: ‘When did you first find it had changed? That you could care for me after all?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kirren said, ‘and I don’t think I’d tell you if I did.’
‘I would tell you, if I knew,’ he said.
‘But you don’t know?’
‘No, not quite.’
‘ “During the past few weeks.” ‒ That’s what you said a while ago.’
‘I think, with me, it’s been longer than that.’
‘And with me,’ Kirren said.
‘Your father said this would happen to us … that nature was bound to play its part … that a man and a woman thrown together were bound to feel something for each other sooner or later.’
‘I know pretty well what my father said. But oh, Jim, is that all it is?’ She looked at him in laughing dismay. ‘Something that would have happened to us, quite regardless of who we were? Just any woman? Any man? I can’t believe that.’
‘No more can I. Because you are not just any woman and I am not just any man. But perhaps in some peculiar way your father sensed something about us, or perhaps it was just pure chance. Anyway, however it was, he was in the right of it.’
There was a silence. He looked at her.
‘Kirren,’ he said.
‘Yes, what?’
‘Your father is much better now. I don’t think it will be necessary for you to sit up with him tonight.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it will.’ She looked at him with dark, steady gaze. ‘Tonight will be our wedding night.’
In another three days Riddler was up and about again, groaning and swearing at the pain in his joints, but hobbling stubbornly everywhere, refusing all help save that of a walking-stick. First he went to see his mare in her stall, to give her a piece of his mind, he said, and let her see what she’d done to him. Next he went to look at the fields, which were still badly waterlogged, and the valley meadows down below, where the floods still lay like a great shallow lake. And lastly, sighting the doctor riding slowly up the track, he went hobbling down to meet him.
‘Tell me, do I look as if I need you?’ he asked. ‘No, by God, I’m damned if I do!’ But almost in the same breath he said: ‘Ah, well, having come this far, you’d better come in and have a drink, I suppose.’
The weather continued wet and cold and the valley lots remained flooded for the best part of ten days. Slowly, at last, the floodwater drained away from the meadows and the green springing grass was seen again, but everywhere, both in meadows and fields, the land was kept wet by repeated rains.
‘Is there to be no end to it?’ Kirren said. ‘Are we never to be dry again?’
‘You needn’t go out in it,’ Riddler said. ‘Being a woman, you’re lucky like that. You can stay snug and warm in your kitchen here and pretend to be busy about your chores.’
‘And what about my dairywork? And going to market once a week? I have to go out of doors sometimes, otherwise I should suffocate. But oh, dear, what wouldn’t I give to have a few dry days for a change!’
‘You seem cheerful enough, anyway, in spite of the weather,’ Riddler said.
‘Do I?’ said Kirren, on her guard.
It was one morning after breakfast, and she and her father were alone. Jim was out tending his flock but Riddler, whose joints were still troubling him, was taking it easy by the fire.
‘Not only cheerful, neither,’ he said, ‘but something else as well besides.’
Kirren, at the table, washing up, glanced at him from under her lashes, but made no reply, and Riddler, in a thoughtful tone, went on: ‘I can’t quite fathom it out, but there’s something different about you these days. I’ve noticed it once or twice of late, but I just don’t know what it is, unless it’s something you’ve done to your hair.’
‘My hair is the same as it has been for years.’
‘Then maybe you’re wearing a new dress,’ he said.
‘This is the dress I bought last spring.’
‘Well, it’s a mystery, then, that’s all, and I shall have to give it up. But there is a difference in you all the same and whatever it is it suits you right well.’
‘Does it, now? Fancy that.’
Kirren now came to the hearth to fetch a cloth for drying up, plucking it down from the string line that hung in a loop from the mantelpiece. Instead of turning away, however, she stood with the cloth between her hands, and Riddler, leaning back in his chair, slowly raised his face to hers.
For a little while father and daughter eyed each other, glimmeringly, until the amused satisfaction of one and the indulgent mockery of the other kindled a mutual gleam of warmth mixed with a kind of sardonic understanding. Riddler was the first to speak.
‘I knew you’d come to it in the end.’
‘Then no doubt you’re feeling well pleased with yourself.’
‘It seems I’m not the only one …’
‘I suppose you think the credit’s all yours?’
‘Of course the credit is all mine! Damn it, girl, if it wasn’t for me you’d still be the same crabby spinster you were before, sharp-tongued and hard as nails, all back-answers and black looks and temper enough for two or three!’
‘No compliments, please,’ Kirren said.
‘You were made for marriage, Kirrie. I always knew that, all along. And I’ll tell you something else as well ‒ you were made to be the mother of sons.’
‘All in good time,’ she said, ‘perhaps.’
‘Time!’ he said, glaring at her. ‘You’ve already wasted a year and a half! Yes, and that reminds me, while we are speaking of such matters ‒ next time you go in to town, buy yourself a double bed, so that Jim can sleep with you, decently, as a husband should, instead of creeping about at night, robbing a poor old man of his sleep with all this opening and shutting of doors.’
A few days afterwards news came to Godsakes, via one of the carters at Peele, that Philip Sutton’s wife Jane had given birth to a baby son.
‘Well,’ Riddler said to Jim and Kirren. ‘I never thought to say such a thing about the Suttons, but let that be an example to you.’
Chapter Twelve
The spring and summer of that year were the coldest and wettest anyone could remember and the bad conditions brought much trouble to farmers everywhere.
In the second lambing at Godsakes, losses were almost as bad as in the first, and all through the summer there was much to do to keep the flock free of foot-rot and sickness. It was the same with the rest of the stock: a constant watch had to be kept on the cattle and at the slightest hint of a c
ough or a chill Jim was in close attendance, rubbing the beasts down with a brush to invigorate them, and administering soothing drinks. Even so they lost one of their best cows from pleuro-pneumonia; also a heifer fifteen months old.
There was no proper course with the crops that year. Everything happened out of turn. Swedes and mangolds could not be sown until the first week in June, and carrots were sown later still. They made growth quickly enough but so did the weeds, and with the land so sticky and wet, little hoeing could be done. Three acres of Dutch beans were spoilt by mildew; they had to be cut down while green and fed to the pigs; and haymaking, begun in June, was still in progress at the end of August.
But whatever the trials and anxieties of that dismal year it seemed as though some benign spirit was keeping watch over Godsakes Farm and its people. There was a radiance over their lives; a sense of warm unity in everything they did together; an optimism at work in them that neither anxiety nor misfortune could touch.
Jim had the feeling, new every day, that his life was rather astonishing, and that many great and marvellous gifts had been bestowed upon him. He had always been an ambitious man; had always felt that he could do great things; but now this feeling had another dimension, as though he saw his future life laid out before him, as in a vision, with a rich golden light spread over it. Problems were nothing; he welcomed them; for he felt with utter certainty that he could overcome them all; that he had it in him to mould his life pretty much as he chose. And at the heart of this feeling of his, giving him this special faith, was the love that had grown between him and Kirren.
‘Sometimes I feel that I don’t deserve the good fortune that’s come my way,’ he said to her once, ‘but I mean to deserve it, in the future, by working for it and earning it.’
‘When did you not work?’ Kirren said. ‘You have always worked, all your life.’
‘All that is nothing,’ he said with a smile, ‘to what I shall do in future years.’
At the end of August, when haymaking was finished at last, they cut their few acres of dredge-corn, oats and barley as before. But this year, due to the constant rain, both barley and oats were spoilt by disease, which meant that the whole crop was fit only for the pigs and fowls.
‘God! Just look at it!’ Riddler said, holding a sodden, discoloured sheaf aloft on the prongs of his hay-fork. ‘Did you ever see such stuff? It’ll never be dry in a hundred years!’ And as September came in, with the weather still wet and cold, he said: ‘I’ve never known such a summer as this and I never want to see another like it again so long as I live.’
The only comfort Riddler could find for the year’s disappointments was that things had been much worse at Peele. Abelard’s losses at lambing time had been almost half as great again as Jim’s and there had been further losses since. Among the pedigree Alderneys that were such a source of pride at Peele there had been an outbreak of rinderpest, and ten prize-winning cows had been lost, together with a number of calves. And, even worse than this, for a farm that grew so much corn, was the weather’s effect on their harvest.
Their spring corn had never been sown, due to the wet and the cold, and except for a growth of green weeds, many fields remained bare all through the summer and into autumn. And their winter corn was a sorry sight: acres and acres of wheat and barley laid low by the wind and the rain, the barley sprouting in the ear, the wheat so infected with the smut that whole fields were darkened by it. There was no golden glow in the harvest fields at Peele that year, but only a sombre, shadowy pall. There was no happy noise of reaping-machines, for the corn was so wet and so badly lodged that it all had to be cut by hand.
‘Just look at them all, swarming about!’ Riddler said to Kirren and Jim. ‘They’re having to put their backs into it and do a bit of work for a change! And their masters won’t make three thousand pounds from their harvest this year, by God! They’ll be lucky if they make three thousand pence! This damned wet season has hit them a sight harder than it’s hit us here. It makes me laugh like a spinning-top to see them slaving away over there, knowing they’ll get no gain from it.’
‘Why, what good does that do us?’ Kirren said.
‘I don’t know what it does for you but it does me a power of good to see bad luck come to them for a change.’
It was a dull but dry day and they were at work in their own harvest field, opening up the corn-shocks, soaked by previous days of rain, and setting the sheaves out in twos so that they might dry in the wind. Kirren and Jim were working together, separating the wet sheaves, and Riddler, who had finished his row, was standing near them, his hands on his hips, looking across the valley at Peele.
‘After what they did to me I reckon I’m about entitled to crow over them for a change,’ he said.
‘And do you intend,’ Kirren asked, ‘to carry your grudge right through to the end of your life?’
‘Yes, why shouldn’t I?’ Riddler said.
‘It seems to me rather childish, that’s all.’
‘Childish, is it?’
‘Yes,’ Kirren said. ‘It was all a long time ago. It’s silly to bear a grudge for so long. Jim doesn’t feel like that. He’s put his quarrel out of his mind.’
‘Has he, now?’
‘Yes, he has.’
‘And what’s so surprising about that?’ Riddler said with a curl of his lip. ‘What was his quarrel compared with mine? The harm he got at the Suttons’ hands was nothing but a fleabite compared with the harm they did me. In fact it was a bit of good luck for him when John Sutton turned him out, for he wouldn’t have come to us otherwise and how else, in God’s name, would he ever have got a farm of his own? He’s fallen on his feet and no mistake, and well he knows it, you may be sure.’
With his chin jutting pugnaciously, Riddler turned and went stumping off, to work by himself on a row of shocks some little way further down the field. Jim and Kirren, having stopped work, looked at each other across the sheaves.
‘It’s no good trying to change him, you know. His hatred for Sutton goes too deep.’
‘Yes, I know, I know,’ Kirren said. ‘I’d do better to hold my tongue, I know.’
‘Nor is it any good holding me up as an example of Christian charity because what your father says is true ‒ I have fallen on my feet and I am well aware of it. Indeed, it is a very strange thing, but twice in my life so far, when someone has done me a bad turn, it has worked out to my advantage in the end. First, when my uncle abandoned me and John Sutton took me in, and then, as your father just said, when John Sutton turned me out and I came over here.’
‘You consider yourself lucky, it seems.’
‘Yes, I do, for I’ve not only got this farm but I’ve got you as well.’
‘Riches indeed!’ Kirren said.
‘Oh, you may mock if you like, looking at me with those dark gipsy eyes! But what more could a man want from life?’
‘Surely, if you give it some thought, there must be something more you want …’
‘Kirren, are you telling me something?’
‘Yes. I’m going to have a child.’
They stood looking at one another and there was a quietness over them both. A stillness in him. A growing smile.
‘Well, that explains it,’ he said at last.
‘Explains what?’
‘Why you are looking so beautiful.’
‘Am I beautiful?’
‘Yes. You are.’
‘I take it you’re pleased, then, with my news?’
‘You don’t need to ask me that.’
‘My father is looking over at us. He will be shouting at us in a minute, asking why we are standing idle.’
‘In that case, we’d better get on.’
They resumed their work in unison, taking the wet sheaves from the shock, shaking the raindrops out of them, and standing them up, two by two, in the path of the wind.
In another few minutes, however, they stopped work again because overhead in the grey sky the clouds parted and the sun shone
out, falling on them with a gentle warmth and filling the valley with a soft bright light. They stood with their faces upturned to the sun, grateful for the light and the warmth they had seen and felt so rarely that summer, and Riddler, just a little way off, stood in exactly the same way, lifting his blunt, crooked face to the sun in a childlike gesture of gratitude.
And away on the far side of the valley the reapers in the fields at Peele, labouring over their blighted harvest, also stopped work and stood, greeting the sun with a little cheer that was heard clearly in the fields at Godsakes. Hearing the sound of this cheer, Kirren and Jim smiled at each other, and Kirren, putting one hand to her eyes, turned to look out over the valley, softly lit by the golden sun shining through the parted clouds.
‘I wonder how this valley will look, and these two farms, when our children are growing up, say in ten or twenty years’ time.’
‘You are looking a long way ahead.’
‘Yes, and why not?’ Kirren said.
Books by Mary E. Pearce
The Apple Tree Saga series
Enjoy all five books in the Apple Tree Saga series
from Wyndham Books
Apple Tree Lean Down
Jack Mercybright
The Sorrowing Wind
The Land Endures
Seedtime and Harvest
and these standalone novels, also by Mary E. Pearce:
Cast a Long Shadow
Polsinney Harbour
The Two Farms
The Old House at Railes
www.wyndhambooks.com/mary-e-pearce
Wyndham Books: Timeless bestsellers for today’s readers
Wyndham Books publishes the first ebook editions of bestselling works by some of the most popular authors of the twentieth century, such as Lucilla Andrews, Ursula Bloom, Catherine Gaskin and Naomi Jacob. Enjoy our Historical, Family Saga, Regency, Romance and Medical fiction and non-fiction.
Join our free mailing list for news, exclusives and special deals:
www.wyndhambooks.com
The Two Farms: A moving family saga set in a Victorian farming community Page 19