Jaen

by Betty Burton

  'Ted my dear, you'm the nicest man I met, but you an't much of a one for business.'

  Ted Scantlebury looked closely at Annie in a way that he had never looked at another woman.

  'What's being sold to visitors,' Annie went on, 'is a bit of memory of Emworthy, or a few minutes of talk when they get home. They a put the box on a shelf and their friends will ask about the shells and the visitors will have five minutes of pleasure talking about summit they really don't know anything about. But that don't matter. It's been an honest enough deal; you got to look at it the same way as selling summit like a . . . picture.'

  Ted came close to Annie and gave her an awkward but gentle hug.

  And Annie did not move away.

  'You're a fair wonder, Ann; you runs rings round me. You got such a sensible head on your shoulders. You seems to be able to cope with anything from cooking to mending a fence. It's the way you just get on with things. I have a great liking for you, Ann.' He flushed at the unaccustomed expression of his thoughts. 'You'm what I should call . . . a woman for all seasons.'

  He gave her an awkward but gentle kiss and still Annie did not move away.

  She patted his arm in acceptance of him. 'Tis what most common women are, Ted.'

  PART THREE

  Journeys

  1

  Betrisse Saint John's return journey to Newton Clare, a dozen years or so after her furtive, miserable exodus, could not have been more different.

  It was not until she was settled in the coach on her way to see solicitors in Winchester that her mind turned to the changes that had taken place since the day she and Annie had stood together on the shore at Emworthy, the lapping glitterish sea soaking into the frayed hems of their skirts. Betrisse laid a hand upon the large brooch upon her bosom. Annie's token. The broken-edged oyster shell was now clasped and edged with silver and with a silver pin and chain to hold it secure.

  Hidden, hanging on a fine silver chain, and lying between her breasts, is the only tangible relic of her life as Betrisse Hazelhurst. The gold disc with the Caesar's head. The Up Teg 'seal.'

  At the age of twenty-one, Miss Saint John is tall and as straight-backed as Annie Saint John, who is now known in Emworthy as Mistress Scantlebury. Mistress and Master Scantlebury have just waved a tight-smiled farewell.

  'I shall come back soon, Annie.'

  'I know you will, Bet, I know.'

  Both women, although having a fleeting thought about how long 'soon' might be, know that she will return.

  As they stood watching the horses being harnessed and the coach made ready in 'Scantlebury's' yard, Betrisse held the baby Leonard and talked to Annie through him.

  'I promised my baby brother that I should not stop away from him for long. I've got to be here to make sure that his first words have the sound of the Big House about them.'

  Sharing him as they had been doing since his birth, Annie took back the child from Betrisse and gazed at him as though it was the first time she had set eyes upon him. They caught one another's eyes and both laughed, and said in unison, Betrisse relinquishing for a moment her acquired way of 'talking like Big House folks,' 'My but an't he a fair miracle.'

  And so he was.

  France Hazelhurst, had he known, would have agreed, for it had not occurred to him until it was too late that Annie was not barren. Annie had conceived the baby in her forty-second year, only weeks after adopting Ted Scantlebury's name and sharing his bed.

  When Leonard Scantlebury was born into the midst of the prospering trio of Ted, Annie and Betrisse, he brought with him an abundance of pleasure and joy. They all doted upon him and he thrived upon threefold love and care.

  An elderly couple who were seated opposite Betrisse, and had observed the great fuss that was made by the entire staff at Scantlebury's when she entered the coach, wondered at the drawing together of her brows as she moved so as to get a last glimpse of the waving people, and then a last glimpse of the sea.

  Betrisse keeps her gaze fixed upon the passing scene, not wanting to become too much involved in the inconsequential exchanges that are inevitable inside a coach. How strange, it is only at times like this that one is able to see how many changes have taken place. On the few occasions when she had thought about the things that must have altered at Up Teg, it was only that her sisters would be growing up, or a moment of wondering how many more children had been born, whether Uncle Ed was married or James Norris.

  Now she knew.

  It had been Ed who had told her.

  The very road that the coach was riding so smoothly over had brought Ed Hazelhurst, with his small entourage, to Emworthy on his way to put on a show at the hiring fair in Chichester.

  The elderly couple see a faint smile flicker about Betrisse's mouth and are sure that she is going to meet her lover. But the smile is for the remembrance of meeting Lord Oak.

  The responsibility for greeting guests as they arrived, seeing that they were comfortable and fed after their journey, was Betrisse's. She, like everyone in Emworthy, had seen the notices that had been posted everywhere showing two huge men in a bare-knuckle fight, and she had heard that one of the men was the famous Lord Oak, a giant who had fought bare-knuckle and wrestled his way to riches, and now had bonded to him a number of young giants who entertained at fairs with tournaments of wrestling and fighting with bare knuckles and shows of strength.

  Ah, that meeting. No wonder Betrisse smiles.

  Lord Oak had announced himself at Scantlebury's with a shout.

  'Ho!'

  An unnecessary announcement, for Betrisse was only a few feet from him.

  'Uncle Ed!'

  The words of astonishment were out before she could stop them.

  He had looked the tall young woman up and down in the manner he obviously always used with young attractive women, but with puzzlement. Not the befuddled puzzlement of many men whose way of life involved being punched daily with bare fists, for he had never reached that state; his boast was that he had never lost his looks or his brains. It was true of his brains, but of his looks — bent nose and a scarred lip — it was a matter of preference in the observer.

  Puzzlement, for he had not been called 'Ed' for years, certainly never 'Uncle Ed'.

  Then Annie had appeared carrying a pile of linen.

  There was an instant recognition.

  'My God! 'Tis young Ed!'

  Annie had paled with the great flood of different emotions that passed through her, the most dominant of which was fear.

  'Well, well. Annie! So this is where you got to. They always said you'd a went off to Salisbury.'

  He had transferred his attention back to Betrisse, whose upright stance and calm expression belied the succession of images that sped through her imagination, belied her violent thoughts, and fear of a Hazelhurst presence. Overriding all this though, was the thought that, for all that they had built a new life, for all their prosperity and security, she would have run off again without a second thought rather than be claimed by Luke. And if they bound and forced her . . . her jaws had clenched at the image of herself at bay . . . of herself wielding a whip as he had done, a knife . . .

  His voice had been full of amusement.

  'And you'm the little gel? "Uncle Ed" you called me. Well, then . . . an't that something to think about. Lord Oak have got a little niece as well as a sister.'

  'No sir.' Betrisse put the full force of her Snows-greatly voice into her reply. 'Lord Oak has no niece. Nor Edwin Hazelhurst, not since the day his brother burnt red stripes into his child's skin when he beat her.'

  'Why Gel, you'm magnificent!' Then Lord Oak pulled his brows together. 'Did Luke do that? It was never mentioned, only that he had chastised his wayward child. And you had took her off somewhere, Annie.'

  Small as she was compared to her tall niece, Annie had stood protectively before Betrisse and spoke up defiantly. 'We shan't never go back. Never!'

  Again, Betrisse's travelling companions see a smile flicker as she gazes
unseeingly at the chalk downlands. Superimposed upon the grassy vista, she sees herself and Annie when the huge prize-fighter says, 'Ah, and I can't say as I blames you, for wild horses nor hunger wouldn't get me back to live under my father's fist.'

  As Annie said later, 'I don't know if it is him that changed, or me. Or perhaps he was always a decent understanding youth and I never noticed.'

  Her observation was after an evening when the three exiles from Up Teg talked of their success and pleasure in their new lives.

  'I hated that old work,' Ed Hazelhurst told them. 'Fighting the Almighty to get a few bushels of summit . . . never a fair fight with Him. The years and years we should get close to harvest and there'd be some pestilence or blight come on the crop, or a great hailstorm.'

  'You have not come from these other fights untouched,' Betrisse had said, nodding at his collapsed nose and lip and eye scars.

  'They was give when I was new to the game, and they was give in fair contest.'

  Gradually, as they talked, they began to trust one another, slowly at first, circling round, testing the water so to speak, until each had the measure of the other; then they broached the topic of Newton Clare. Ed had never been near the place since he left.

  The first years away he travelled from fair to fair, mostly in northern parts. The Rathley man who had first persuaded Ed to take to the roads had travelled with him ever since, arranging the contests and shouting the spiel. He went back home from time to time, thus keeping Ed informed of what news and gossip there was of 'back there,' but never breathing a word to anyone there of his partnership with Edwin Hazelhurst.

  And so it was that Betrisse learned that Luke was dead.

  'Things is not good there. But it serves him right — ' 'him' being Baxter Hazelhurst, Master of Up Teg. 'He was so fixed in his mind about there never being nobody but him and his living on Teg land that he good as sold his soul to the Church lawyers.'

  He did not know the details of what his father had agreed, but it was rumoured that the Commissiners had got him all hands down.

  'Now they changed their minds, and there an't nothing the old man can do. They'm going to sell house and land over his head.'

  EMWORTHY TO WINCHESTER

  In the jolting coach Betrisse feels, as she has done on many occasions since that day when Ed Hazelhurst happened by chance to choose 'Scantlebury's' at which to break his journey, other jolts-excitement, apprehension and the thrill of the commission entrusted to her.

  When he arrived, Ed had assumed that Annie and Betrisse must be servants, and for a while they let him believe that this was so.

  'Don't tell him nothing,' Annie had told Ted and Betrisse. But as Ed revealed to them his own prosperity and attitude to 'back there,' Annie revealed to him the extent of their success.

  Ed was a true Hazelhurst in that he was not afraid to boast of the apparently never-ending stream of women he had loved and who had lost him, and the gold that he spent and that which he had safely tucked away.

  'It was a hard and tough business,' he had told them. 'And it wasn't nothing like this. I slept 'neath a good many bushes, using what bit of money we had for food to keep our strength up.' He clenched his fists and flexed his arm muscles in a way that Annie recognized as Hazelhurst, but slightly self-mocking. 'But I made more gold these last years than most men of our kind makes in ten lifetimes.'

  Ted was impressed, having seen 'Lord Oak's Fighting Men' years ago. 'Well, you got to admit, he have got something to boast about. It's a few years since I saw his show. We had to put in at Portsmouth. I remembers as though it was yesterday: wrestling . . . bare-knuckle contests — a fine sort of entertainment. Not the usual bit of roped-off fairground, like most fight booths, but put on in a public room. The place was overflowing. No wonder he can wear such fancy waistcoats.'

  During the week of the fair, Ed had travelled back and forth each day along the short road between Chichester and Emworthy, coming in to the owners' private rooms at Scantlebury's winking at them and jingling a small leather drawstring pouch of coins. Except for Ted, they did not meet Ed's partner.

  'Best if he don't come here. He's a good sort but he do like to gossip, and he'd let slip summit about you when he was visiting home, without even meaning. I shall tell him I found a couple o' ladies that have took my fancy.' Masculine pride widened his broad chest. 'He's used to my ways in that direction.'

  Betrisse said that meant he could be trusted not to give them away to anyone, for his partner was his closest friend.

  Annie still retained some caution and, except for inviting Ed to take his supper with them, treated him as she would other well-to-do guests. Betrisse found him of absorbing interest. He had awakened her curiosity about her roots, and she dragged from him every morsel of information that he had about the years after Annie had taken her away, and what he had learned since from his partner.

  Ted found him a good companion and, after accompanying Ed to view the wrestling contests and the exhibition of fighting, had said there must be summit in the air round Newton Clare to turn out three such successful moneymakers. Four, when you counted his partner, as Ed pointed out.

  'It's because we wasn't risking nothing,' said Annie. 'None of us would be so free with trying out new ideas now — not now we got summit to lose.'

  The rumbling male voices of Ted and Lord Oak could be heard in the long hours as they made exchanges of fishermen's yarns and travelling-show-men's tales, the outcome of which good fellowship was a smoke and rum-fumed admission from Ed that, 'You'm worth three of our France any day of the week.' And with that Lord Oak was accepted as a reliable member of the runaway branch of the Hazelhurst tribe.

  None of us would be so free with our ideas now we got summit to lose.

  Annie had been wrong. There was something within the four of them that pumped the thrill of new venture through them. They formed a partnership of four, and Betrisse — as the one who can 'speak' and read a bit and make a reasonable signature — is their representative. They will make an offer for the Up Teg house and any land the Church representatives will sell.

  There is a short stop at Havant, but Betrisse stops close to the coach, as though to sit inside the inn would indicate to the coachman that there is no urgency to get on. Although she feels Emworthy dragging at her the further from it she goes, she wants to be at Winchester, to complete the business there.

  She tries to imagine Up Teg as it must be now, but she cannot.

  Luke is gone too.

  She has held hatred of him inside her soft nature, like the pit within a peach. She cannot imagine the place without him. That Jim Norris or Grandfather are not there can be imagined. But — Luke is gone!

  Ed had mentioned it almost casually, as though he had forgotten that his little ragged, wayward cousin who made much of herself and shouted, 'I'd be a better farmer than anybody' at the assembled family, that the child they had searched for, over downs and copse and stream and tracks for days, and this formidable young woman were the same.

  Luke's gone. Skidded down the bank at Deep Run and got drowned. Pete found him so I heard . . .

  Luke's gone!

  Had she heard that he had died in his bed, the hatred might have remained with her, but he had drowned in Deep Run and nobody had found him till morning. A bad way to die.

  It was all even.

  All settled between herself and Him.

  When she heard Ed speak of Luke so casually, the kernel of hatred germinated but then gradually began to grow and change into a shoot of compassion for her mother. What was she like now? Martha.

  Betrisse might well have caught the morning coach and arrived at Winchester the same day, but she found a dozen reasons to put off leaving, seeing that all was in order, anticipating, giving instructions. So, it is evening when she steps down at the King's Head in Wickham. She looks critically at the place, and before her box has been taken in, counts a dozen faults that she would not stand for at Scantlebury's. No wonder Scantlebury's is gainin
g such a reputation for high standards.

  The King's Head is a fine imposing building — not a collection of cottages bought up piecemeal and dragged together like their own place — but its walls are smoked yellow, its hangings smell of years of cooking and dust and oil fumes. No attention to the detail of comfort. She hugs to herself the secret the King's Head does not know — that people will pay good money to be 'Clean and Decent' and sleep in simple comfort.

  Already she misses Emworthy.

  3

  UP TEG TO CROUD CANTLE

  A few months earlier Hanna had made a journey.

  That the two cousins travelled by horse-drawn vehicles, was the only similarity.

  Betrisse had left leisurely, with embraces and good wishes from people who loved her and who were concerned for her comfort. Although she soon missed her Emworthy family her mind was full of the important purpose of her errand, and what might come from it. She travelled with her mind stimulated.

  Hanna . . .? Hanna tries to eradicate from her mind any memory of her journey.

  On that same evening as Betrisse eats supper at the King's Head in Wickham, miles away from the people she thinks of as her family, Hanna is preparing a meal to eat with those she thinks of similarly: Grandmother Bella, John and Rosie . . . Jude.

  Rosie, who cannot hear or speak, lives at Croud Cantle now. She came to live here whilst Hanna was away. Rosie is a relation, but what the relationship is, Hanna cannot fathom. She has been told but it has not yet registered as either factual or important.

  Because Rosie — beautiful, gentle, smiling Rosie — is deaf and dumb, it is to her that Hanna confides, silently, those things that she cannot tell anyone, not even John.

  She is able to tell Rosie because Rosie has no language, and what Hanna knows is too full of anguish and passion to speak of aloud. In her mind words and images writhe like a nest of snakes. Each time she silently lets her mind open up in Rosie's sensitive presence, a few of the snakes slither away.