‘Sent to escort you,’ a voice said. ‘You and the little maid.’
‘What?’ Barrass turned and stared back along the path. ‘Olwen!’ he accused. ‘Is it you?’
She stepped forward and took his hand. ‘I thought you might be lonely,’ she said, ‘and if you were, I wanted it to be me you had for company.’
The unknown man chuckled. ‘I’ve heard about you, boy,’ he said. ‘Age no barrier, young and old treated alike.’
Barrass raised a threatening arm but the man laughed again and led on. Barrass followed with Olwen close behind him, still clinging to his hand.
At night Markus’s house looked unwelcoming, the late hour adding to the threatening, crouched appearance of the place. The windows showed not a chink of light. Dogs, barking and scratching at some unseen door, sounded like a threat, the heavy trees overhanging the drive an added repellant. Barrass felt his hand grasped tighter as the man called and knocked at the dark door that seemed thicker than the one on Swansea prison. He wondered if he would ever be allowed out again. He pulled free of Olwen’s hand and put an arm around her instead, holding her close so she shared the beating of his heart.
The door, opened by an unseen hand, revealed nothing but blackness. Their escort struck a light and a candle blazed briefly before settling into a small useless glow. They followed it, stumbling, across the hall.
‘Light the sconces,’ a voice commanded, and the room in which they found themselves was revealed as a library, with books on three walls, the fourth wall having four large windows, uncovered by curtains. Arthur was in a huge armchair with his dog, small, thin and curled up, and creased almost to nothing by anxiety. He managed to offer them both a sickly grin.
‘Lights matter not at all to me,’ Markus said, ‘but I want to put you at your ease.’ He smiled in their direction and gestured to a chair. ‘Please sit. Miss Olwen, how pleased I am that you could come.’
They sat, Olwen as close to Barrass as was possible. Ale, port and brandy were offered, which they refused.
‘I wish to hear your version of what happened this afternoon,’ Markus said. ‘All of it, the full, truthful story, and I warn you, I know enough to be able to judge the honesty of it.’
‘I will tell you all I know,’ Barrass began, but Olwen interrupted,
‘The first part of the story is Arthur’s, I think.’
‘Then please begin.’ The man’s head went unerringly to where Arthur sat nursing his dog.
Between them they explained every moment of the time from Arthur overhearing soldiers’ conversation at the alehouse, and of Olwen’s calling at the cave to wake Barrass. Then they waited for the man to comment. He frowned, the sightless eyes open but showing no emotion. Olwen was stiff with sitting tensely for so long in one position, but she dare not move. Barrass wondered how he could save her if their story was not believed.
‘I see,’ Markus said finally.
Two of the candles had gone out, their wicks, weakened by lack of trimming, collapsing in the hot wax. Knowing that Markus could not know, they said nothing. But Olwen shivered as the uneven light distorted the man’s face, making it threatening and as unwelcoming as the house.
‘I believe you.’ Markus stood up and smiled, the smile oddly pleasant in spite of not reaching his blind eyes. ‘My men will see you safe home. Sleep well.’
* * *
Olwen did not go to her bed that night but sat close to Barrass beside the fire, holding his hands, sleeping against his strong shoulder. Spider woke them early the next morning as the cockerel crowed.
‘Best you come fishing with Dan and me until we know what’s to be done with you, boy,’ he said. ‘As for you, my girl, you’d best be off if you don’t want a hiding for being late for work.’
* * *
Olwen foolishly believed that Barrass belonged to her after that night spent in his arms. But when she next went home he was gone. She wandered disconsolately down to the village to see Arthur.
‘He’s back here,’ Arthur told her excitedly. ‘Pitcher, he persuaded that Emma of his that it’s the only way she’ll get her room done and finished.’
‘Where is he now?’ Olwen asked, a shyness preventing her from relaxing and cheering the news with the jubilant Arthur. ‘I want to talk to him.’
‘Well, as for that, l think you’ll have to wait a while.’ He shook his head with a smile of amused disapproval on his pale face and, not knowing how hurtful his words would be, whispered, ‘Gone to see his latest lady-love, I suspect. That Miss Ddole, would you believe!’ He shouted in offended surprise as Olwen hit him and ran off.
It was soon widely known that Barrass was acceptable again, but the mothers still feared him, especially Emma.
‘I don’t want him near us, Mr Palmer,’ she shouted when she had finally been worn down into agreeing that he should sleep in the cellar with Arthur and the dog. ‘He isn’t safe with decent girls – he’s mined one of your daughters and I fear for the other two!’
‘Heavens above, Mrs Palmer, is it your daughters you can’t trust? What sort of schooling did I pay good money for if you tell me you can’t trust them round a fellow with a strong body and a weak resistance? Takes two, Mrs Palmer! It takes two!’
‘Mr Palmer!’
The inevitable tears ended the argument, with Barrass allowed back but strictly forbidden to climb the stairs to the rooms used by Pitcher’s family.
Barrass looked wistfully at the arch behind the house, and went to see Penelope.
* * *
The disused, musty old coach became for Penelope what the archway had been for Violet. Whenever Barrass was free of his work for Pitcher, he made his way to the coach house and let himself in. Penelope would be waiting for him, breathless with love and longing.
No one seemed aware of their meetings, but Olwen, who knew Penelope well enough to guess when she was doing something she should not, knew each time they met and felt the growing pain of it. She did not tell, but suffered each meeting as if the time was taken from her own life, making her older and yet further away from Barrass than ever.
One day she could bear it no longer. As Barrass slipped out, she confronted him at the side of the coach house.
‘Olwen! You did give me a fright!’
‘Nothing to the fright you’ll have when her father finds out!’
‘You wouldn’t tell, you’re my friend,’ he coaxed.
‘Wouldn’t I? Just come here once more and you’ll find him waiting for you instead of her, with her fluttering eyelashes and her pouting mouth!’
‘Come and walk with me, Olwen. I’ll explain what it’s like.’
‘No need. I’m not a child.’
‘Of course you aren’t, although you are a child in some respects. The ways of a man and woman are something you aren’t ready to learn.’
‘Teach me,’ she said, facing him, hands on hips and blue eyes blazing with anger. ‘Kiss me like you kiss her and see if you think I’m too young.’
‘One day you’ll find someone worthy of you. I’m not. I couldn’t stay true to one woman, even one as deserving of loyalty as you.’
‘Dadda is loyal, Dan will be when he gets Enyd to agree to be his wife. Why do you have to be different?’
‘I’m greedy.’ He smiled, then went on, ‘I suppose I was lacking in everything relating to love when I was a child, and having grown up and discovered the pleasures of women, well, perhaps I am recouping what I’d missed. You are constantly hugged and shown affection by your family. I had never been touched except in anger or disgust until I was fifteen. Discovering the liking young women had for me was balm to my loneliness. Do you understand?’
‘You don’t really love them, not like Dadda loves Mam?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Not like I love you?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
She seemed satisfied with his attempt at an explanation and left him, to return to the kitchen and bear the cuff of Florrie’s hand with a
stoicism that surprised that lady, who was used to a fiery retort. All she had to do was keep Barrass from marrying one of his brief loves, until she could make him see her as the one true love in his life. Somehow the task did not seem so difficult now it had form and could be put into words. But she could not pretend not to mind when Barrass and Penelope met so close to where she washed pots and scrubbed floors.
Dismay, jealousy and anger built up in her as the day progressed. Why should he treat her, his real true love, with such disregard? Suddenly it all boiled over.
‘I think someone is using the coach house as a home, some tramp probably,’ she said to Florrie later that day. ‘Shouldn’t it be firmly locked for fear of a fire?’
While Penelope walked across to see John Maddern to tell him she would not be his wife, Florrie set David to work fitting a new lock and an extra bolt on the coach house, hanging the key in the kitchen where it could be easily seen.
* * *
‘But why?’ John asked when Penelope broke the news. ‘I will give you everything you want. A London house and the social life that goes with it, a home here as well so when I need to see your father we can make a summer visit and you can invite all your friends.’
She waited, hoping even then for a declaration of his love for her.
‘You wouldn’t be broken-hearted,’ she said sadly, ‘by losing me.’
‘I don’t understand such words,’ he said with a smile. ‘I do know that with you as my wife my life would be complete, without it there would be a great lack. Will that do for you? Will you now put me out of countenance completely and deny me the happiness you represent?’
‘A lot of words, but no emotion,’ she replied.
‘Emotion comes later, when we are married and begin to know each other in the way men and their wives enjoy.’
He took her blushes for innocence, but she was looking at him and wondering how he would compare with Barrass.
‘I’m sorry, John,’ she said, giving him a slight touch of her lips as a goodbye.
She walked home light-hearted. Now she would begin to persuade her father that Barrass was worth considering as a son-in-law. If only she could find him a responsible job. There was nothing more telling on a man than the way he earned his liVing.
* * *
Olwen heard the news with dismay.
‘Barrass is a fool, with less sense than he was born with,‘ she told Arthur over and over. ‘Why I bother with him I really don’t know.’ But as she lay in her small bed each night, she knew why and realized that even if her body was still and small and child like, she was growing up.
In the bed behind the partition, she heard Dan tossing and turning in his straw-filled bed and guessed that for him too, life had problems. She lit a candle, pulled a coat over her night-gown and went to sit on the end of his bed; a small face in the woollen night-cap looking at him with sympathy for them both in her clear blue eyes.
‘Growing up isn’t very nice, is it, Dan,’ she whispered, ‘Not nice at all.’
Chapter Eighteen
William looked thoughtfully at the new key hanging in the kitchen. He had a wild suspicion about who was using the coach house, one that he was trying not to believe. He lifted the key from its hook and told the cook that he would keep it in his study.
‘I must think about getting the place repaired one day,’ he said as excuse.
‘There’s a lot of work to be done before it’s usable,’ Florrie warned. ‘And where will you put the coach? That won’t last either unless something is done a bit quick.’
‘I will talk to Ivor when the spring comes. It’s been neglected for so long another month or two won’t matter.’ He tapped the shining new key on the palm of his hand, and frowned as he went out of the kitchen.
* * *
A few days later, Penelope put on her warm cloak, slipped out of the door and made her way to the coach house. She saw no one, the path she took rarely used by the servants. Her face glowed with excitement at the prospect of an hour or two with Barrass. They had made the tryst at church, passing in the crowded doorway as people paused to adjust their hats and hoods against the heavy rain. Careful not to be noticed, she had whispered a time and a day, and walked on, taking her father’s arm and nodding to her acquaintances with polite smiles.
Time had passed slowly, until the day she saw her father off to a meeting in Swansea with hardly contained excitement. She did not notice the scar on the coach-house door where her father had removed the recently fixed lock, only curling her fingers around the worn wood and pulling it open. Barrass was standing there, not running to greet her as normal, but still and silent. Beside him, a restraining hand on his arm, was her father.
‘Father? Barrass?’ She tried to bluff her way out of the dangerous situation. ‘I thought I heard a noise and came to investigate.’
William let go of Barrass’s arm and stepped towards her. He raised his hand just once, almost knocking her off her feet with the slap to her face. Barrass stepped forward with a shout and the men began to wrestle.
‘Stop it!’ Penelope shouted. ‘You will have the servants here in a moment. Stop it, I say!’
William dismissed Barrass and guided his sobbing daughter towards the house.
‘If you harm her—’ Barrass threatened.
‘I will not touch her again,’ William muttered. ‘But I cannot say the same about you!’
* * *
Penelope sat trying to look chaste and offended but succeeding only in looking guilty and dejected. She had known it would be difficult to persuade her father that Barrass was the man she wished to marry, but now, having been caught so embarrassingly, like a servant girl, she knew it was impossible.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘You are going away from here. Right away. We have friends in London. I will write to them at once and ask if they will have you there for a year or so, until you have grown up!’
‘A year or so? I don’t want to go to London, Father. I like it here.’
‘You go to London, and the only way you can escape living with Gerald and Marion Thomas is by agreeing to marry John – if he will still have you after this. Be sure I will tell him.’
She was silent for a while, sitting on a stool with her father standing before her, a threatening figure, alien in his fury. The silence stretched uneasily.
‘I will go to London if you promise not to punish Barrass. I have already told John I will not marry him. Father, the fault was mine. Barrass would never have approached me without encouragement,’ she whispered.
‘You are not in a position to argue,’ William said, then he relented and nodded wearily. ‘All right, I’ll say nothing of this to anyone.’
* * *
Barrass strode to the kitchens angrily and, ignoring Florrie, dragged Olwen outside.
Growling ferociously, like Arthur’s dog protecting a bone, he said, ‘So, you call yourself my friend, do you? Loyal friendship doesn’t include telling William Ddole about my meeting his daughter! He slapped her. Do you know that? He slapped his daughter and almost had her off her feet.’
‘Barrass, I didn’t—’
‘Of course you told him! No one else knew.’
‘Someone must have. I didn’t tell, I promise you.’ She was frightened for a moment, then the anger faded from his dark eyes, restoring her composure, and she said cheekily,
‘I knew, so why shouldn’t others? Not very clever at keeping your assignations to yourself, are you, Barrass? Especially when your partners in love have a bulging belly to show for your attentions. Can’t keep anything quiet then, can you, Barrass Bull!’
She thought she had gone too far and backed away. Barrass was glaring at her, breathing hard, and she was relieved to hear footsteps and see the tall, well-dressed Keeper of the Peace arrive. She backed away from Barrass and, opening the door, called,
‘Daniels is coming, Florrie.’ She turned back to Barrass. ‘Got to go, I’ve work to do.’ She met
his glare with a frown that knitted her fine brows together, and slipped in through the door.
Barrass moved away after greeting Daniels, but did not go far. Daniels had left the door slightly ajar, and Barrass stood blatantly listening.
‘I’ve called to see if you have caught anyone at the coach house,’ he surprised Barrass by saying. ‘Did you leave someone watching as I suggested?’
‘Didn’t get a chance,’ Florrie explained. ‘As soon as I told Mr Ddole he took the key and said he would see to it. Said he’s going to get it rebuilt, he did.’
‘There was something else,’ Barrass heard the man say, coughing nervously. ‘Will you take a walk with me and my children after church next Sunday?’
Barrass stepped away, not wanting to hear any more. So Olwen had not spoilt things. He felt a momentary guilt at his treatment of her, then his thoughts returned to Penelope, wondering how her father would choose to deal with her.
He was still undecided about what to do, not wanting to leave in case, somehow, he could help Penelope. He moved back from the kitchen door and stood trying to think of a way to see her and find out if she was all right. William Ddole came around from the stables and, seeing him, strode across to berate him for ignoring his demand to leave.
‘Is she all right?’ Barrass asked before the man could speak.
‘No thanks to you if she isn’t!’
Any further words were silenced as Florrie came out of the kitchen door followed by Daniels. The couple walked in a friendly way a short distance from the house and they saw Daniels’ hand gently squeeze Florrie’s as they talked and laughed, their heads close together.
Summer’s Last Retreat Page 33