by Betty Burton
Nor will she forget the last look of terrible bewilderment upon Jaen's face as Hanna came rushing in from the outhouse. 'Ju?' she said as she fell.
Slowly, like a leaf on an airless day.
During the time it took for her father's full-fisted, back-handed blow to fall on Jaen's neck — crack! — for Jaen to be lifted away from it . . . to twist . . . to fall . . . to hit the wooden chest — crack! — Hanna had caught her father wrong-footed and hit him across the shoulders. Slowly. Slowly. The blade that he had made her unnecessarily re-do twice that morning, slowly sliced its way through woollen cloth and then flesh. Slowly. Slowly. He fell and lay across Jaen. Lay across her but not in the way that he had intended when he came into the house.
'Hanna?' No more than a whisper.
It is Jude.
Jude has come from downstairs where she has been to see that Bella is all right. She has whispered 'Hanna?' several times every night. Until this time, Hanna has ever only replied flatly, 'I'm all right,' and Jude has got silently under her covers.
'Jude?'
Hanna hears Jude catch her breath at her response.
'I only wondered if you would like some of Rosie's may-weed tea?'
'Mint'd be better. Can we sit in the porch?'
'Oh Hanna.' Jude collapses upon Hanna's cot and tries to hold Hanna, but it is Hanna, taking Jude to her small bosom, who does the holding, the comforting. They sit not noticing the awkwardness of their positions, rocking and mingling slow tears.
Hanna has begun to try to return a part of herself to Jude as compensation for a particle of her lost sister. But she knows that she cannot; she is not Jude's Jaen any more than she was Jaen's Ju. She is Hanna.
The breach that opened between them when Hanna chose Jude for a scapegoat will never be filled. But they have begun to build a bridge across.
In the little light that comes before the true dawn, the hedgerow birds are singing out the boundaries of their territory. The cottage is quiet except for the soft throaty snore of the stricken Bella Nugent and the crackling furze beneath the singing kettle and fermity pot.
The delicate smell of warm mint steam pervades the porch where Hanna and Jude sit and watch the chalk-hills around the Cantle valley appear outlined against grey, then lavender then pink.
It is difficult not to think that the sky lightens too over a grave in Newton Clare that neither of them has yet tended, or that it shows up the outline of a prison-ship in the Solent.
'I'm sorry for what I done to you, Jude. I think I wasn't myself.'
Jude indicates with her warm knuckles against Hanna's lips that it is over.
As much as it can ever be for the sister and daughter of the woman who died to the sound of a bough cracking.
14
NEWTON CLARE TO EMWORTHY BAY
As soon as Baxter's burial was done, Betrisse went back up Four Post Hill and waited for the coach that would take her more directly home. She had been at Up Teg for five days now and had sent no message back to Annie since the few words from Winchester.
When she started out upon the journey to Newton Clare, she had not intended to be there for very long, for she had been eager to return to Winchester and look again at the place she intended to rent and turn into her first tea house, and to look at two other possible places into which she might expand. She had no doubts about her success: as with Scantlebury's she had seen the possibility of a simple need, simply catered for. She had known also that she could tackle this alone. Her mind had been alight with the prospect of organizing the scheme. This was what her entire experience had been leading up to. This time, there was no being lifted up as Old Baxter had lifted her to get a down view — she saw exactly where she was going. This time no finance except her own. No ideas but hers. She would start small and quickly expand.
On the journey to Newton Clare she had, in her mind, budgeted, planned, refurbished rooms and decided upon the design of every cup, plate and spoon that would be used in her . . . she decided against copying the idea of the coffee-house — a hanging sign, much like the one at Scantlebury's, held the message THE SAINT JOHN TEA ROOMS.
Annie did not hear her come, so absorbed was she in the baby laughter she was blowing and tickling from young Leonard. Annie had everything in the world she had ever wanted. Betrisse would tell her the entire Up Teg story so that Annie could feel, as Betrisse now did, that France would never turn up and claim Annie as his wife.
'Well, well. Playing with the boys at your age, Mistress Scantlebury.'
'Bet!' Not abandoning the child, she gathered both to her. 'We was beginning to think you had gone for a soldier.'
'I hope everything was all right. I was a bit worried in case my being away so long put too much on you.'
What would she have done had Annie said that they could not get along without her help?
'Well Lord, Bet, you'll never guess. Ed have been helping out in the front.'
'Ed?' The idea of Ed greeting guests and showing them to their rooms made her smile.
'You got no idea how good he is. He got the showmanship . . . like you. He can put it over, people likes him.'
Ed appeared in the doorway. 'May I show the lady to a Single, at the front, with a view of Emworthy Bay?'
There was no denying, he had the presence. Tongue in cheek with Betrisse, but she could see that he was made for such a life. Guests would never notice a small, humble menial man, but Lord Oak in his bright silk waistcoats would be attractive. Lady guests would adore him. She could see him picking up ladies and carrying them over the street mire to their carriages. The idea of him in her tea rooms flashed into her mind, and then she remembered. If Ed stayed, he would be the easing of her mind when she told them that she was leaving.
Scantlebury's was busy, so Betrisse immediately got back to work, helping Annie with sorting and folding linen. The laundry maids were in the room, so that Betrisse could relate nothing except that she had achieved their objective of becoming owners of the Up Teg house and a small strip of land.
If pique had been one of Betrisse's faults she would probably have shown it when she realized how well they had got on without her. But when she saw how established Ed had apparently become, and how quickly he had become popular, she was pleased.
Broaching the subject when he came in to carry off baskets of laundry, as unselfconscious as though it was a usual thing for a man to be seen doing, Betrisse said, 'You ought to take up this kind of work in your old age, Ed.'
'I reckon I should start now.'
'And do me out of my position?'
'Ah, we could both come out of the same corner, Bet.'
'Dear Lord,' Annie said, 'can you imagine being met at the door by them two?'
'Ah, Lord Oak and Lady Birch.'
'Better than Ed and Ted as it has been this last week or so.'
'Would you give up the fairs?' Betrisse asked more soberly.
'I been ready to give they up a year or two now. It's a young man's life. Time I settled down.'
Annie closed one eye at Betrisse. 'He's thinking of taking up farming again.'
'Never!' So firmly.
'Well, taking up farmers' daughters.'
Ed grinned. 'That's more like.'
'He an't slow. I sent him up to Tillett's for duck eggs and he comes back near betrothed.'
'You haves to be quick on your feet in the fight game.'
By the time Scantlebury's guests had been fed and settled, it was late. It was then that Betrisse revealed that she had been to Up Teg.
Unmoving, Annie and Ed heard her out. Ted flicked his eyes from one to another of the three, watching their reactions. Betrisse was matter-of-fact in relating how she had come to be in court and subsequently at the trial. How she had decided to go back to Up Teg, and what she had found there.
'It is all a terrible mess. Their only means of support is what they got from the Norris Land. It was the one bit that Dan did not have under his control. Vinnie had her way about how they should farm it
, and there wasn't anything that Dan could do.'
'How did it get to be so bad?'
'First, because of the Old Man being so taken up with things like this.' She takes the Up Teg seal from a pocket. 'He was obsessed with the continuance of the Hazelhurst name at Up Teg. If he had left them to have gone on running the farm as they had always done, it would not have been half so bad, but he would hand everything over to Dan, who was the worst farmer of them all. Then when things started to go wrong, it seems that Grandfather was too weak to do anything.'
'Couldn't none of the others control him?'
'I think that they did try, at first. Uncle Dick told me of the terrible rows they had. He and Luke and Peter, trying to tell him that it was dangerous to put everything into one kind of crop. He said, "Even the women could see it wasn't a wise thing." She looked at Annie, knowing that she would return the half-amused, pained expression that had always been her own silent response to 'only a woman' or 'even a woman'.
'Yes, well. Dan's not a woman, so it an't surprising he'd think hisself too great to take notice of anybody.'
Betrisse pursed her lips in a small smile for Annie. Annie might have allied herself to Ted and borne his son but the woman who had flung her wedding-band into the Emworthy mud had not gone.
Betrisse went on building for them a picture of the events, as she had been told, which had led to the dual tragedy. The one contributing to the other.
'Whilst Grandfather was able, he backed every decision Dan made. Uncle Dick said that his father must have realized that Dan was gambling with everything they got.'
'They'd a been sitting pretty if it'd come off. It wouldn't a bin the first time the price of corn has give a farmer gold lining to his pockets.' There is to Annie's ear a disturbing gambler's eagerness in Ed's voice.
She says, 'You wouldn't of gone all out for one crop and nothing else?'
'They had the sheep and the Norris Land.'
'It is as well they did,' Betrisse says, 'or they might all have been on the roads by now.'
'What caused the crop to fail?' Ted asks.
'Smut, mildew and Dan Hazelhurst never taking advice from anyone.' Betrisse's determination to try to show no emotion whilst she related the events, fails briefly.
'Soaking the seed in salt and water a stop the smut.' A statement by Annie.
Betrisse nods. 'That was how the tragedy of losing the crop was part of the tragedy of Jaen.'
The night-watchman calls that it is two o'clock on a clear night, and Betrisse is transported momentarily back to the city where great bells announce the time, back to the busy excitement in the thronging streets, one street in particular where there is an empty ale-house on which she had advanced one month's rent, and outside which swings the sign she had envisioned painted over white and lettered in gold THE SAINT JOHN TEA ROOMS.
Betrisse is now bringing her story to its conclusion, relating it as nearly as she can to how Vinnie had told her. Ed has fallen silent and Annie's gaze is far away.
'If Jaen hadn't a just said it in front of the whole fambly, it wouldn't a been so bad. But she said, "That whole crop out there have started the smut."
'"Smut, smut, smut. There an't a speck nor blemish of smut or mildew on a blade of it," Dan says. "You been on about smut since the seed was fetched."
'It wasn't like Jaen to say much at all when we was all together, and I hadn't never heard her answer him back.
'"I only said that if you was going to plant out the whole acreage with wheat, it ought to be soaked in salty water first to kill any old smut."
'I never seen him so angered. I think he must of seen it already — the beginning of the smut that is, and couldn't bring hisself to admit. And what with Dick starting the whole thing going by asking Pete to have a look at the corner bit next to Norris's, he was probably already fearing the worst.
'"Hark at her. She had a few years growing rhubarb for the 'pocethary on a ladleful of land that wouldn't hardly raise a flock of grasshoppers and she thinks she can tell me how to run a farm like this. Woman, you gets queerer every day. You'm going to finish up in the madhouse."
'Bet Gel, it was like he had punched her in the belly. She seemed to crumple up and she just sat there staring at nothing with tears running down her face like anything.
'Well, of course she was right. It was like fire had been set to the fields. It was the frighteningist thing I ever saw. Day after day, our living for the next year disappearing before it was growed.
'There was a terrible fight between Dick and Dan when it did come to light. Dan was supposed to have told the hired lads to make a salt wash for the seed. They said that Dan had never told them to do it. Which was true, for he hadn't even bought in any salt.
'So you can see, he was already in a state.
'Well, on the mornintg before it happened . . . before, well, Jaen . . . she come in to my place, Jaen did. I could see that she was in one of her queer moods — she always had a sweet smile and although she would be looking your way, she never seemed to properly see you; it was like she was watching pictures in front of her eyes.
'"Vin," she said, "haven't you ever noticed how George is the spit out of France's mouth?"
'And he was. He got that tight hair that do sometimes run in their fambly — like France and a uncle of theirs I saw one time. So I said to her, "Yes, he takes after that branch of the Hazelhursts with the tight crimp hair."
'"No Vin," she said, "not Hazelhurst, only France."
'She didn't seem to be really talking to me, but kept looking up to Brack where you could see the flock.'
'"I always thought it was a pity Annie never gave him a child of his own. So I got George for him."
'Well, I tell you, Gel, I didn't know what to make of it. I know she used to talk to him more than the others, and I can understand that. I'd seen them more than once, sitting on some old tree at the bottom of Brack, or on Cuckoo Bushes, but they wasn't doing anything except talking. But she worried me.
'"Listen, Jaen," I said to her. "You don't want to go about saying things like that, people might not know just what you meant."
'"There isn't anything to understand. George is the baby I got for France, and I'm going to tell Dan that we must give George to him, so that he can have a son too. We got more than we can do with."
'It was the way she said it. I swear she didn't mean that France was the baby's father; it was like she was going to give him a present.
'"France has always been kind to me," she said.
'That was the last time I saw her."
The room at "Scantlebury's' fell silent.
Betrisse stared into space for a moment. 'Jaen was found dead in front of her own hearth, and they say it was Dan who hit her — accidentally, not meaning to do it hard.'
Betrisse could not bring herself to tell them any more just then. Later perhaps. Perhaps she would tell Annie at some time, but it was not a tale to be told except in low voices, between two people, as it had been between Betrisse and Vinnie. If Annie never heard the whole story, it would not matter; in fact it might be the better if she did not hear, for the memory of Vinnie's relating the tragedy of Jaen's death remained fresh and chill in Betrisse's memory, remembering every word.
'I don't know whether she said anything or no. She was like that when she was in her strange moods; she would tell you something, and forget it almost as soon as it was out of her mouth. I can't hardly believe it, for she'd had six babies one after the other, and hadn't wanted none of them, poor thing — she wasn't likely to offer to have one — no matter how kind she said France had been to her.
'Anyway, on the day it happened, I saw him — Dan — striding down towards the house. Bet, it an't easy telling such ripe gossip about your own fambly. Well, he came down, and I knew what he was after; you can't live close as me and Jaen have and not know what is going on, if he wanted her satisfying him in the middle of the day, he'd just walk off and look for her . . . and not only her, the maids and the servants'd do
for him. I've seen him take a hold of girls and try pull them just into the outhouse or anywhere and she having no more say in it than a puppy on a rope following its master. If one of us is about, the girls'd come and say Master Dan's hunting again, and next time he'd be a bit more careful. They was two a penny to him, the little maids that got hired out for keep by their famblies who have had to take to the roads.
'Nobody will know what happened, except perhaps that poor little Goldy of theirs. But, putting together what I heard and what I saw, I think it must of been that he was out hunting again, and Jaen tried to stop him because Hanna was in the outhouse. Or Jaen had gone queer again and started telling him about her having the baby for France.
'I heard Hanna shrieking and shrieking. I rushed down and through the ford. Miz Nance had been just by chance coming by with some furze in a little wagon thing she uses since she got such bad bones, and she heard it. The old lady bade me see to Dan — we could see Jaen's neck was broke — she had to throw water at the girl to stop her screaming. Then she drags Hanna into the wagon and driv off going like a rabbit before a weasel.
'Perhaps there was something more — I don't know. But the old lady would have it that the child was the cause of it all but she never have said why. Perhaps it's a case of the sins of the fathers visited on the children, like it says in the good book. That never seemed right to me, because it wasn't Hanna's sin that got Jaen poddy in the first place, now was it?'
15
'I AM GOING BACK THERE'
It is only as she hears herself saying the words that Betrisse knows that she has made the decision.
Throughout the journey from Rathley to Emworthy, she had thought over every possible way of doing what she wanted to, and what she knew that she ought.
She wanted the full life of the city. She wanted the Saint John Tea Rooms. She needed to be successful, to be seen to be successful, to be noticed — to always stand as on the trestle-table at Vinnie's wedding feast, and see a thrilling prospect laid out below her. It was not enough for her to know that she could succeed — she needed to prove it.