Jaen

by Betty Burton

  Her sisters and aunts had been surprised that she was not expecting soon to be wed, nor was interested.

  'Why, Bet?' her sister Kit has asked. 'You could get yourself a gentleman if you wanted to. You got everything a man could wish for in a wife.'

  'And what should I get?'

  'A husband.' Rachael's tone had suggested that a husband was what Betrisse ought to have, want one or not.

  'If as you say I've got everything, why on earth should I exchange it for a thing I have no wish to have? And lose my freedom into the bargain. It's a trick that's played on us that it's a prize for a girl to get a husband and lose her freedom.'

  Kit looked sharply at her sister, wide-eyed at the talk of revolution that Betrisse had brought.

  Rachael, at coming eighteen years of age, wanted marriage above all else.

  'It's all right you talking like that,' she said. 'You got money of your own. I can't say as I wants the kind of freedom we got here. Ha! I'm free to weed the fields, churn till my arm drops off, scour down the dairy, scrub breeches and smocks.'

  Betrisse's reply was spoken quietly and seriously. 'And what do you think you are going to do once you are wed?'

  'You don't understand what it's like living here. We been living like the poor of the village. You don't know what it's like. You got money.'

  'I've money of my own because I did all those kind of things — working my fingers to the bone, and scouring and scrubbing and . . .' In her urgency to make her sisters think, she almost let out, 'and packing oysters and scallops'. 'And . . . kept the money I earned for myself.'

  Rachael gave Betrisse a look that said that there must be more to it than that.

  'Don't you want to have children?' Kit had asked.

  'I can have a child any time I like.'

  Her words seemed to freeze in the air before she realized that she was no longer in the free and outspoken company of Annie. Her sisters did not know her yet.

  She had laughed. 'No need to look like that, Rachael, I meant only that there are so many here, that I could take one under my wing.'

  And on the journey back to Emworthy she thought more and more of that idea. Six growing boys with no parents were a great burden upon Martha and Elizabeth and Vinnie. The older ones, Dan'l, and Young Bax and Francis, were hardly yet earning their keep, and the other three were still only crow-stoning and weeding and picking flints. As well as their domestic work, nowadays much more of the farmwork was being done by the Up Teg wives and their daughters.

  On that journey too, she worked out her tearooms scheme to the last detail. Planning its development had shown her where her talent lay, and the prospects of a new and unknown life excited her. It had shown her, too, her weaknesses: the main one being lack of skill with numbers. At Scantlebury's they relied upon Ted to do an accounting once a year, but day-to-day income and outgoings were dealt with in a most haphazard way. So, she determined to set about learning, convinced that, as she had found with legal papers, once you saw through the nonsense, it was not difficult. That would be her first task, to become skilled in everything that would further her ambition, to be as self-sufficient in the city as Annie had taught her to be in the early Emworthy days.

  Up Teg needed money to survive, and as soon as her tea rooms were set up, then she would be able to help. She could perhaps also help them at sowing and harvest and help with the bringing up of all those orphaned boys.

  These were the things she wanted to do. To prove herself with the tea rooms, as well as do something about the terrible plight of those at Up Teg.

  'Back?' Annie looks at Betrisse as though she is speaking a strange tongue.

  'To the farm, to Up Teg.' She mocks herself. 'I'm going to put the place to rights. What about buying out my share of Scantlebury's, Uncle Ed.' Teasing him with her lashes and smile in a way she could not safely do with any other man, except Ted.

  'Done!'

  'Will you not bargain with me, like proper business people must?'

  Annie says, 'Bet, you'm serious, an't you?'

  Betrisse sits on the floor where she can hold her mother/aunt's hands. 'It's time I went, Annie. I had already made up my mind I was going to leave and go and live in Winchester before I ever went to the farm.'

  'I should a made Ted go to Winchester, then it wouldn't of ever happened.'

  'Oh, so you wouldn't a minded me not coming back then?' Ted said.

  'An't no fear of you going off.' Annie smiles affectionately at Ted. 'You knows which side of your bread got the butter on.'

  'When I was in Winchester, I realized that I was beginning to lose interest in running this place. That don't sound very nice, does it? It's nothing about you, Annie, or Ted, but it is something in me. I had a real desire to do something like we did when we started up this place. I don't know whether it is because I am made differently from most girls — I can't believe that I am — or whether it is because when you brought me here, I had a chance to be different.'

  'But why go to that ole place?' There is a plea in Annie's voice that suggests — 'if you got it in your head to go somewhere, why choose to go There?'

  Betrisse turns to Ed. 'I will wager with you that had you been in the company of any other young woman telling her mother that she was going away alone, you would have heard threats and tears and a man would have been called in to forbid it. A shocking, dangerous thing.'

  She is back on the trestle-table again, looking down on Ed, on men. She wants to show him that she is as capable of standing on her own as he was as a young man. She watches herself doing it, but cannot stop. 'A woman with no man for protection going off to make her fortune — and what does Annie say: "Why that place?" Do you find it shocking, Ed? Do you believe that I shall come to a bad end?'

  It is the first time that he has seen women behaving as though they were father and son. He does find it disturbing.

  Ed is serious and his voice is low. 'No, Gel. I think Annie have done a good job on you.'

  Betrisse sits with her head resting upon Annie's knee. The warmth of love between the two permeates the room. They are letting one another go publicly. Owing each other nothing and everything. Thirteen years of loyalty and love.

  They are letting go.

  Untwining their lives.

  For thirteen years they have lived like two closely twisted stems of bindweed — to separate them it is necessary to have care and patience and a knowledge of the nature of the plant. Annie and Betrisse will separate, but the kinks and twists that have been formed by thirteen years entwined in independence and closeness, are permanent so that the stems might at any time be rewound, rebonded.

  'I need your money for my share, Ed, to get the farm going again.'

  'You can have what I got.'

  'No. Just pay me what my share is worth. If you are going after Tillett's daughter for a wife, you will need to buy a bed.'

  Verbally sparring with her: 'I'm banking on her bringing all her own duck feathers, so I shan't have that expense.'

  Jolliness is now back on the surface.

  It is Ted who asks the question.

  'Why are you going to do it, Bet?'

  'Go and live at Up Teg?' She pauses for a moment. 'Because of all those little boys, I suppose. They need a foster-mother, and I'm the one best placed to be it.'

  She looks directly at Annie. Independent, free, a woman out of step with her own times, Betrisse still needs Annie's nod of approval.

  Annie nods. There was never any doubt that she would.

  PART FOUR

  Hearth and Home

  1

  On January first, opening day of the new century, Hanna Hazelhurst walks from St Peter's Church, Cantle with a new name, a new wedding band and with her dear, loving John Toose.

  Her two spinster aunts, Jude and Rosie, have followed every word, watched every expression on the faces of the couple as they made their vows to one another, and are satisfied that Hanna's life is mended. If there are any splinters left in the wound of th
e tragedy of her parents, then practical John will ease them out tenderly.

  Only Hanna knew the absolute truth about her mother's death, and that is buried too deep for even John to know, although she has told him something of Jaen's strange obsession with giving George to the shepherd, France. What Jude knows of her sister's last months of life, and especially of her last hours, is one version of the truth. Jude has enough to cope with, living in a world where Jaen does not.

  On the face of it, Croud Cantle is not much changed, though John is slowly building up their crops of plants and pot herbs. Town-dwellers, with their small garden plots, pay well for a plant of primrose whose flowers are tinged orange, or for a purple-leaved sage bush that is practical as well as pretty. But there are changes.

  'Come on, Hanny, up in the wagon.'

  'Listen to him — giving me orders before I hardly left the church.'

  They smile broadly at one another.

  'You promised you should obey me, woman.'

  'Tomorrow, John. I promise I shall obey you tomorrow.'

  'Tomorrow and tomorrow . . .'

  'Ah you and your poetry. Jude's been at you again.'

  Hanna looks round but Jude has gone.

  Silent, smiling Rosie watches the beribboned wagon move off, taking the new husband and wife back to Croud Cantle, where Hanna will kiss her Grandmother Bella and show her the shiny wedding-band. Grandmother Bella will stare at something that no one else can see. Hanna will talk about what provisions she will take to sell on the market, discussing as though Bella Nugent's mind is still alive. As though she is still the red-haired grandmother who had once shown Hanna love — the kind of love that both her daughters hungered and thirsted for, but which Bella never felt for them or, if she did, could never show them.

  2

  On January first, opening day of the new century, Betrisse Saint John stands on the bleak summit of Brack Down. It is a place she escapes to quite often. When she walks away from the farm she tells no one, gives no reason. If they say, 'There she goes, off up there again' or, 'What she want to go all up there on her own for?' she does not hear them. If she did, she would not care. On Brack she is free for a short while of their small minds, their fears and pettiness, their clawing need of her.

  Kit and Rachael escaped to milk cows on an estate farm ten miles distant, and Rachael is now established in a rickety cottage on the estate. Her husband is blessed with an employer who provides no less for his estate workers than other Hampshire landowners provide for workers who keep them fat and idle and rich. In his desire to keep up with the rest, he provides an abundance of long hours, gives hard labour and poverty in plenty; he is unselfish in his distribution of damp walls and fair-handed with broken roofs. He keeps none of these for himself and his pretty family. He makes no distinctions — men women and children, he treats them all alike.

  And Rachael Raper, née Hazelhurst, now feels that she has become fully a woman. When she is not working in the fields and garden, she has a man and two babies and a pig and a spinning-wheel to keep her occupied. In her spare time she walks abroad collecting snapweed and furze. She also now feels that she is someone, a person — she is 'The Cowman's Wife.'

  Kit has not achieved such distinction. She went from field-milking to dairy to kitchen, where she showed her ability in a moment of crisis in the household. Kit was one of the few servants not to be laid low when the rest of the household succumbed. It was her chance and she took it. Kit is now Second Cook under a cook whose legs cannot keep going for very much longer on the chill kitchen floors below ground. Kit knows her worth and is just biding her time till she can bargain her skill for a decent wood floor.

  Betrisse turns in the direction of Winchester. In her mind's eye she sees the busy streets, the bare trees in the pale January sun waiting to burst into green as she once saw them; the rooms on which she had paid an advancement in rent are, in her imagination, still empty and waiting for the day when she will bring them to life with plain drapes, plain carpets, aromatic teas, quiet talk and a discreet clink of coins.

  There have been times — often prompted by her own harassment with the boys — when her fancy takes flight and she adds new and fantastic ideas to her establishment, such as facilities for children, little tables in summertime under an awning . . . ah yes, better, under a fig-tree . . . and somehow water trickling . . .

  The dream is always changing, being embellished, becoming perfect . . . dreamlike.

  Dreamlike. For, apart from the Up Teg house, and the small bit of land that surrounds it, she has nothing.

  As always when she escapes to Brack, she gazes in the direction of Cantle and wonders about Jaen's sister. She hopes that the man who was with her throughout the ordeal of the trial still loves her. Although she can never imagine that pair living in a cottage, fussing over mundane and domestic matters — but then, there had been a time when she could not have imagined it of herself. She surmises that Hanna lives there, but will not enquire even from a packman or carrier, and she is not a woman easily approached with gossip — these days, there is more than a hint of Annie's way of looking at people — and best not to turn over old midden ground.

  Nance Hazelhurst is dead. When they lowered her into her grave, she added very little weight to the wood and nails of the coffin. She did not seem to die, she gradually dried out like a little stranded newt. When the family stood at Nance's graveside, Elizabeth was still alive, but now she has gone too. During her years away, Elizabeth's was the one face on the dark side of the barrier that Betrisse could ever bring to mind, but now that she has gone, Betrisse cannot remember one feature of her.

  Sometimes she looks towards the waters of the Solent where the prison-ships set sail for the other side of the world. Is he still alive? She can never imagine a thousand miles of sea. What if he did return? Part of his term has already been served. Part of her own term has been served. In ten years' time . . . Ten years. She will be thirty-six years old.

  She closes her mind to the possibility of herself still living down there on the valley floor then, down there helping to fight the land and the weather and the small, often invisible enemies that will destroy animals and crops overnight.

  A few miles further east along that same split coastline is Emworthy.

  Whenever she climbs to the summit of Brack on bright summer days, Betrisse looks for the thin bright line of the glitterish sea. Ted writes twice a year. Mostly about young Leonard. Ed's schemes for making Scantlebury's into 'something' are curbed by Jessie Hazelhurst, onetime Jessie Tillett, who brought to their marriage not only a beautiful duck-down quilt, but a deal of commonsense which Annie appreciated. Annie and Jessie get on very well, as do Ed (who has become Edwin again) and Ted. They usually send 'something to help with the rent' or 'a bit to help out when it comes to pay the Church Commissioners'.

  'Annie says you must come and see us very soon,' Ted writes. 'And so do we all. The Captain died . . .' The Captain? Yes . . . of course. I remember now. The Captain. What would he say if he heard how broad my vowels have become? But, as with riding a horse, she knows that she will never forget her Snows-greatly accent.

  Betrisse always intends to visit Emworthy, but now is never quite the best time — perhaps when the lambing's over, or the harvest's in or the boys have got over their fevers or rashes or festered wounds.

  The boys. Now — almost — her boys. She can see from here the smithy where Young Bax has gone to get their only horse re-shod. Like Dan'l too, he is a young man of all the heighth and breadth of his male ancestors. He has not been easy, he and Young Bax had been youths when she re-opened the Ham Ford Cottage and tried to make a home for them all together. That had been a mistake. Ham Ford was their mother's home. But, once she and Nance had sorted out who was the head of the family, and it came out that it was Nance, the old lady was quite agreeable to go and live like a dowager in the cottage, so that Betrisse and the boys moved into the Up Teg house.

  At first, only Vinnie knew that Betriss
e held the deeds of Up Teg, the transference of which to Betrisse Saint John-Hazelhurst had been a parting gift from Annie, Ted and Lord Oak. However, once Betrisse had proved that she had more to offer than money and labour, she told the Up Teg family that she was owner and that they need not fear landlords so far as a roof above their heads was concerned.

  They were naturally curious about how she came by them and, although she gave Annie and the men their due in regard to the generous act, she never once gave one hint of where she had lived for the thirteen years that she had been lost to Up Teg, nor where Annie and Ed might now be found.

  Her last view, before she descends to the valley, is of where the sheep run on Keeper's Hill.

  Because France Hazelhurst had always been the Up Teg flockmaster, neither Peter nor Dick had enough knowledge to build up a good flock again. Now though, Up Teg has a run of fat well-fleeced ewes and lambs that are helping bring the farm back to life. This is the achievement of Si Baldwin. A quiet man who appeared sombre until he laughed.

  'Talk the hind leg off'n a donkey once he gets going.' 'Lord, I never heard anybody like theece for argufying, Si Baldwin.'

  It must be three or four years now since Simon Baldwin-Edwards walked into Up Teg and asked to see the Master about a 'raggedy lot of old ewes that looked like they had been running wild with the goats, and needed a decent shepherd.' Betrisse had said, 'It's Mistresses as well as Masters here, and the flockmaster's job is yours if you can swallow taking orders from a woman.'

  'Tis all one to me. Just so long as the one giving the orders is fair, and knows what is what, or better than me.'

  She is now beginning to understand more about what that meant. His talk in the house is like his visits there, always brief, but anyone who meets him out on the hills will likely 'get their ear chewed down to nothing by Si Baldwin'. He had a much-used phrase that Betrisse understands — 'That's never right. Do you think that's right? I don't think that's right.' It echoes her own 'That an't fair!'