by Betty Burton
They sat not speaking. Suddenly Annie felt her animosity towards the girl dissolve. She remembered that just below Beacon Hill lay Cantle village where she had come from.
The girl was probably missing her mother, longing for her home again.
'It's where you come from, an't it? Near Beacon Hill.'
'Our place is just below . . . my mother's place.'
'Dare say you find it different now.'
The girl nodded.
They were silent for a few more minutes.
'Miss it?'
'Yes.'
'Ah, I know. It was like that the first time I got hired. We never had much to miss, except the company.'
'It is that.'
Annie gave a little laugh. 'You wouldn't think anybody could, not with that great herd always coming and going.'
'It's my sister. I miss Ju more than anything I ever knew.'
Annie could see the girl was biting her lip.
'I never saw her except for a few minutes at your wedding. I dare say that lot frightened her to death.'
'It wasn't that.'
The girl did not offer to explain, instead she said, 'Beacon Hill is reckoned to be the highest hill for miles; you can see fifty miles or more.'
'Could you see Emworthy from up there?'
'Where's that?'
'It's the sea.'
'Oh you can see that . . . at least on clear days you can. Portsmouth and that's where the sea is.'
Annie's heart leapt at that bit of information.
'Portsmouth isn't too far from Emworthy Bay, more westerly but not far away. What do it look like from up there?'
'It's a shining line. It's like a brightness that runs across just below the horizon. It's the Isle of Wight that you can see on the horizon. Well, that's what we was always told.'
'I was at Emworthy once.'
Jaen said the right thing. 'What was it like?'
It was a long time since Annie had not felt hateful to people, but up there with Dan's wife she heaved a sigh and felt a small warmth in her again.
From below they heard their mother-in-law calling, so together they went back to the hayfield.
'Gossiping?' Dan asked as Annie and Jaen started work.
'Ah not half — and all about the best man of the whole Hazelhurst fambly.' Annie laughed — a soft laugh that made Nance and one or two of The Boys look sideways at her.
'You a have to go up Keeper's Hill more often, Annie,' said Nance. 'It's a treat to see you smile.'
Betrisse came to Annie walking stiff-legged and red about the eyes.
'What you done then?'
'Doing what she was told not to,' Martha said, 'and she cut herself.'
Betrisse held out her foot for Annie to see the cut.
'It's still bleeding,' she said in a sorrowful voice, then self-pityingly, 'and you was up there with her.'
Annie picked up the child. 'Come on then, I a wash it for you with a drop of skim.'
The child's face adjusted itself to the satisfaction of having attention paid to her by an adult.
About three hours after the sun had reached apogee, Nance went up to the house to see that the girls had got supper, their big, main meal, cooked.
'Not more than an hour,' she ordered, 'then you can get in another four or five hours 'fore it's dark.'
At four o'clock all the family traipsed into the hot kitchen, followed soon by the hired hands and maids. Kath and Myrtle ladled out great bowls of broth made with chunks of fat pickled-pork, turnips and apples, and thickened with barley and flour, which Annie handed to the men. Nance cut up four-pound loaves for dipping-in and to go with the cheese and apple-sized onions; Vinnie and Jaen poured mugs of ale for the men; whilst Martha and Elizabeth, as they each suckled their babies, saw that the four children had something to eat.
At last they were all seated around the long table in order, Baxter at the head with Nance on his left. On the master's right ranged in order of seniority Luke (older by one hour), Francis, Richard, Dan, Peter, Edwin and the hired men. Beside Nance, this time not in order of age but ranged by seniority of husbands, were Martha, Annie, Elizabeth, Jaen and, for the first time at the table as one of the family, Vinnie. On down the distaff side Betrisse, Kit, Laurie and Lucy and the female servants.
Except for a short grace by Old Baxter, for ten minutes the only sounds that might be heard were the slurp of broth eaten hungrily, belches, and sniffs from noses affected by the steam and onions.
Betrisse tried to move to sit beside Annie.
'You get back to your place,' her grandfather ordered.
Betrisse did as Old Baxter's beetle-browed frown bid her, but with her lip tucked up in objection to having to sit with small children.
'You answering me back?' he barked at the little girl.
'No, Granfer, I never said nothing.'
'What's that face for then?'
Only six years old or not, Betrisse was up to him; she stopped her pouting and pulled up her top lip. 'It's my tooth what's come loose.'
The grandfather looked at his sons as though Luke too was still six years old. 'You a have to watch that one. She got a sight too much to say for a girl.'
Luke frowned at Betrisse who drank her broth and looked as though butter would not melt in her mouth. Baxter rumbled on through his bread and cheese, his full whiskers moving with every word and mouthful. Then, as they all knew he would, as he always did when the entire family was assembled at his table, he expressed his dissatisfaction that neither Martha nor Elizabeth had produced a firstborn son to carry on the line properly.
'Six children between you and only two as can carry on the Hazelhurst name.'
The small weakly Laurence and the suckling Nicholas were quite unaware of the expectations of their grandfather, nor did Betrisse, the first grandchild, know that she had been expected to be named Baxter, or that he had put his foot down on the naming of each of the other male children, insisting that it got to be a firstborn to take his name on.
He fixed his eyes on Jaen and Vinnie. 'Let's hope you two does better. The land can't run on skirts — he needs britches.'
Jaen kept her head bowed over her bowl then glanced the head of the family a complaisant smile, but in her mind she was thinking of her mother. Bella Nugent had for years kept their land and their farm in as good fettle as any man could have done, and had brought up Jaen and Jude to do likewise. They did every job from breast-ploughing with a bag of hay stuffed into their bodices, to hedge-laying and taking heifers to the bull. Neither Bella Nugent's nor her daughter's skirts had proved a handicap.
Bella would have found the separation and seating order at Up Teg extraordinary, and she could never have held back a comment on britches and skirts. Croud Cantle was a good little place. She and her daughters were not only good farmers, they were good market traders too. On Up Teg, they sold only stuff that was surplus to their own needs, but on Croud Cantle, they grew and produced specially for the weekly Blackbrook market. The only rules in Bella Nugent's kitchen were not to walk on her red-tile part with wet muck from the yard.
The meal over, most of them went back to finish off the first field, except for France whose responsibility was the sheep. Jaen and Vinnie and the maids went to do their evening work in the dairy.
Quite late, when they could no longer see in the out-houses and lights had to be lit, France came into the dairy. Vinnie and Jaen had finished and were sluicing down the floor.
If Dan was the one with the most Hazelhurst in him, then Francis was the one with the least. Like the others he was tall but, as his mother always said, 'France has got all his heighth in his legs' — the others had their height in their square bodies.
Wherever and whenever there was a local merrimaking or sport, the Hazelhurst sons were in demand. Living as they did in the midst of a rural population which, like its forebears for generations, was ill-nourished, harshly-worked, unhealthy and stunted in their growth, the Hazelhurst men were like another race. Even though
many of them had taken small women as wives, it was rare for smallness to be passed on to sons. Old Baxter's grandfather was reputed to stand 'six foot six a half in his stockinged feet and it took twelve good men to put him in the ground'.
They threw hammers, pulled ropes, hurled rings and pole-vaulted streams, and it was the Master of Up Teg's boast that 'me and the fruit o' my loins will take on any team o' twenty from any village in Hampshire'.
And it was true, they were a fine sight to see.
Although they were twins, France and Luke were quite unalike. From a distance France was easy to pick out from the rest with their straight brown hair; his hair and beard were black and as tightly curled as a negro's.
'You all finished in here?' France asked.
'Just brushing down,' Vinnie answered.
'I be going off then, save Annie walking back up here. Tell Kath not to bother with no supper, I shall have it back home.'
'Master won't like that,' Vinnie said.
'Ah well, I shall have to risk that.'
'The weather's going to hold for quite a few days,' Jaen said, 'plenty of time to get the other leys cut and dried.'
When France was on his own he was often willing to perch on the edge of a bench or something and talk quietly. It was only when he was with the others that he adopted the Hazelhurst manner of loud bombast and argument. Whilst Jaen and Vinnie put away the brushes they talked for a while about the weather, and it ended with his offering to walk with Jaen down to the field so that she could get a breath of air.
Late June, after a warm day.
All day, once the dawn pink had dissolved, the sky had been a blue bowl upturned over the green downs and fertile arable fields of Hampshire. The scent of English summer hung on the air, the combination of the perfume of wild-woodbine and wild-thyme, and from the marshy ground heavy meadowsweet, put Jaen immediately in mind of the bank at the back of the cottage at Croud Cantle. Their mother never liked night air and threatened Jaen and Jude an early death if they breathed in its dangerous humours. But Jaen risked that death and, on warm nights in early summer, she would open the little dormer window a crack and let in the sweet and savoury perfumes.
Ju would keep jumping into her mind when she was least expecting it. There was nothing Jaen could do about it; everybody was too busy this time of year, but Mother was sure to come to 'Clare as soon as she had the time. It was only natural for girls to leave home and not see their own family sometimes for a year or two at a time. But her mother had said that she would ride over as soon as there was a bit of a lull at Croud Cantle.
It was only seven or eight weeks now before the baby was due. Then Ju would be all right. When she saw the baby she would forget that she was ever upset at being kept out of it all till the wedding was arranged.
A single star had come out now, as France and Jaen walked down to where the sound of the family's voices were coming. The sky on the Kent and Sussex side of Hampshire was indigo and on the Wiltshire Somerset side it was pale violet, rose pink and, low on the horizon, a wipe of orange fire afterglow.
That same bit of orange always lit up one of the windows back home and, when Ju was very little, Jaen would tell her the story of how elves spent all day taking pollen from dog-roses and then threw it at the windows of cottages where somebody had been good that day.
'Shepherds' delight,' Jaen said.
'Ah, and mine and all,' France said.
They said nothing else to one another until they were nearly at the field entrance. Then, as though he were embarrassed, he blurted out, 'I an't seen Annie smile in a long time. Did she say something to you when she was up there on Keeper's Hill? She been very sharp and that since she lost her baby. She been very bitter about you and Vinnie Norris, then there was Martha and Elizabeth before. You can understand. Something must have made her smile.'
'We was just talking. Nothing special . . . about being able to see the Solent from Beacon Hill.'
They walked a few more steps without speaking.
'She was telling me about when she was little and she went to Emworthy.'
'Where's that?'
'Further south. Where they catch oysters.'
'And was that all? All you was talking about?' He was awkward and hesitant. 'It an't that I'm noseying into your woman's talk or nothing like that only . . . she don't say much to me these days.'
'We was just . . . chatting like . . .' Jaen dropped the thread of the conversation and waited for him to pick it up. Suddenly it came to her that within France, inside the manly Hazelhurst frame, was somebody as shy in a way as she was herself; somebody who found it difficult to talk about anything other than what was on the surface, work and the weather. It would be even worse for him, being a man, being one of Master Baxter's eldest sons, one of the men who were looked up to in every way in Rathley parish.
'Was you thinking it was . . . well, about a baby? and she hadn't told you?' Jaen could never have said that to him had it not been almost too dark to see properly.
'Ah, summit like that.'
'Oh, France, I am sorry, but it was only about how the sea sparkled . . . it was the remembrance of it that made her smile. You know what it's like. There's some things that don't mean much to anybody except yourself, and yet you would always like to be talking about them, so as to bring them back again for a minute or two.'
France made no comment; he seemed deep in thought.
'I was lucky, I always had Ju. She was good at listening.' Jaen twisted her knife of guilt. 'You could tell Ju anything.'
9
The first cut of hay was all in well before the end of June. Early in July, Luke asked his mother if she would walk over to the cottage sometime and have a look at young Laurie, and take some of her fever physic, which she did that same morning.
She got there too late.
The boy, although at first of a promising Hazelhurst size, had been sickly since birth. Covered in dry patches that nearly drove him mad, he scratched till he bled. They had tried binding his hands when he was little, but once he was running around there was not much that they could do to stop him, except trim his nails often. He went about smeared in goose-grease and chamomile and would stop by any scratching-post and rub his back against it like a little animal. Just after the haymaking one of the open sores had festered and the poison had gone round his small body like furze-fire.
Luke made a box for him and they all went down to the churchyard on Old Baxter's insistence. Some of The Boys thought it was an unnecessary thing to do right at a time when every hand was needed to keep the weeds and insects from the crops, but would not dare say so. Baxter Hazelhurst was still head of the family and his word was law.
'That boy would a been the head of this family and he a get proper respect.'
Of course Nance did not mention that she had gone alone to bury their daughter. Alice, the one and only girl child she had given birth to, five years after Peter. Alice would have been about the same age as Dan's wife and Vinnie Norris now.
Nor did Nance say anything about Luke and Martha's girl baby, who would a been running about the place by now. Nor yet did she speak aloud the thought that the Master of Up Teg had said that they was making a lot of fuss about a babe what hadn't hardly drawn a breath, when Martha and Nance went to the churchyard with the unbaptized bundle — well, twadden as though it was a Christian burial.
But she thought her own thoughts. You couldn't make a to-do about every baby and child that took sick and died, if you did you could spend half your life in and out of the churchyard; but if she was honest, she couldn't really see why Martha's son was worth an hour of Baxter's time, when Alice had not been.
10
If torment was properly the punishment for the few spasms of delight that Jaen had the previous November, then she received it harshly during the last few weeks of her pregnancy. The hot August days could not have been better arranged to make her more wretched. Even when, in an attempt to put him off, she showed him her bloated legs, even whe
n the child dropped low, Dan continued to exercise the rights that he had bought with the ring. He no longer complained, he consumed her much the same way as he downed beer when he was thirsty.
She found it difficult to sleep. The air in the close room was still and hot, and she got no relief from the baby's restless movement, and she was in and out of bed a dozen times a night. But it was her legs that caused her most trouble. Each morning when she rose, she would look down at the normal feet and legs that she had had all her life, but within an hour they had so changed in shape that it looked almost as though she wore knee-boots beneath her skin.
'Here, drink this.' Nance Hazelhurst seemed to be for ever pushing putting a beaker of something into the hands of Jaen and Vinnie.
'It's only mint,' she would say or, It's only rasp berry-leaves, only evening primrose or only bladder-wrack. And Jaen did as she was bid.
Vinnie would often spit out the stuff no matter what dire consequences Nance threatened would attend at the birthen.
Earlier in the year, Jaen made swaddling bands and soaked them in diluted dung to start the bleaching. Now that they had been washed in the running stream and laid out in the sun they were sweet and white.
It seems to Jaen, as she takes the finished cloths from the bramble bush, that here is some proof that the baby is now whole. It too is finished and can be born. She holds the cloth close to her face breathing in the sweet smell. Now the baby can be born. She can get it over.
Now things will change, it will all be all right. A few days ago the baby dropped low and became sluggish.
Yesterday there had been no movement. She had lain awake for hours last night waiting for it to move, feeling herself, pressing hard to make it respond. Her belly had been as rigid as a hill of chalk. Through the thick, coarse flannel, as she rested her hands upon her body, she was put in mind of Tradden and Old Marl beneath their thin covering of coarse downland grass.
'You all right?' Vinnie calls from across the yard.
Jaen smiles and nods.
'What you doing?'