by Jean Chapman
He glanced at the lady on the far side of the stretcher; surely, if she was a doctor, she would not allow this mumbo-jumbo to go on.
Another pair of dark eyes met his, as she asked, ‘Did you want to see my husband? I’m Mrs Joe Abbott.’
He felt stupid, nonplussed, as he automatically held out the sack. ‘I’ve brought back the clothes you lent to my daughter.’
Ruth Abbott reached over for the damp bundle. ‘Thank you. I’ll see your daughter’s are returned as soon as they are dry.’
10
Sam needed time before he returned home, time to absorb the shock of the refined Mrs Abbott and the audacity of the look from the gipsy woman. There was more than surprise in his mind, there was a kind of prescience that these women were to be intimately tangled in his future.
He tried to throw off the idea, but it persisted. He tried to be practical; such gipsies, he understood, could be had for money or trinkets. He had no experience of any woman other than Mabel - and that seemed more a necessary function than an experience. Mabel had for many years made the union seem like just another task expected of a wife at the end of a lone tiring day. Sam’s breath came raster. If the gipsy’s look were to fulfil its invitation, then, he thought ironically, it was his wife he should be paying.
Without making any conscious decision, he found himself making his way along the path, through Joe Abbott’s fence and towards the spinney, where Belle had said the accident happened. He came upon the place easily. The newly wet ground and grass showed where several people had gathered, but there was no sign of the trap although he scouted over quite an area. Still he felt even Belle could not have invented this story. He went back to the flattened area and found, within two short strides of each other, the deep narrow holes where the trap had been pegged down. Who had moved it? His unease growing, he strode quickly back to the farm and made a search of the old outhouses. He should have destroyed the mantrap years ago, he thought, but it had done no harm just hanging there, merely a quaint reminder of harsher days. The nail on which he always remembered the trap hanging was empty, but while the head of the nail showed rust and dust, the shank was much cleaner. If any of the Abbotts had retrieved the trap, and it was his… .
Mabel was in the kitchen when he returned. She, too, had been caught in the storm, and had changed, and she was leaning over the range to hang her clothes to dry. He found himself comparing the tall litheness of the gipsy with Mabel’s comfortable robustness. His speculations were abruptly bought to an end as Mabel questioned his presence, and why he carried the gun at that hour of the day.
He related the facts briefly — Belle’s outing, returning the borrowed clothes, Evans’ injury — the facts, but not the emotions. As Mabel went immediately to the stairwell, he wanted more than anything to be out of the house again - away to find out if Meg Silver was tending Mordichi Evans in the old basket-maker’s hut. Levi had the story that the Evanses had established themselves there.
‘Belle,’ Mabel shouted, ‘get yourself down here!’
He felt a moment’s sympathy for his daughter as he heard the reluctant footsteps coming down the stairs, but he noted the defiance on her face, the toss of her chin as she went to stand by the kitchen dresser.
‘So much for feeling ill, then,’ Mabel greeted her. ‘As soon as our backs are turned, you’re out!’ Belle sniffed and glanced at him, looking as if she expected the next tirade to come from that direction. He moved closer to the range and reached up to put his gun away properly, across its wooden brackets above the mantel. He felt curiously withdrawn from the dispute.
‘Well, my girl, I’m writing to your aunt Lucy today, and we go to Derbyshire on Saturday.’
Belle turned her face to the dresser and stood, fists clenched. ‘Even my uncle said it’s not a fit place for a girl in winter,’ she said,’and yet you’d send me… .’
‘Yes,’ her mother interrupted fiercely, ‘you’ll go - for a good long spell, you’ll go. Bringing tales of mantraps and such… .’
‘You haven’t seen the man’s leg!’ Belle protested, but Mabel was not to be cried down.
‘Huh! Excuses for running after a man, more like! In my young days it was the men who did the running after, not the girls. You should be ashamed of yourself.’
‘Well, I’m not!’ Belle’s control snapped and she shouted back at her mother, thumping her fists on the dresser. ‘I love him! I love him!’
‘Love!’ Mabel caught the word and scoffed. ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word. You’re too young. Not enough to occupy your mind, that’s your trouble. Your aunt Lucy’ll solve that problem. There’s plenty, and more, to do there, with those great boys to cook, make and mend for.’
‘I’m not going.’
‘You’ll go.’ Sam’s uncompromising command was echoed by his wife. ‘Yes, you’ll go, and you’ll stay until you learn to control yourself.’
‘Like you do, you mean.’ Belle spat the instinctive judgement back, woman to woman. ‘You don’t know what love is!’
Sam saw the astonishment on his wife’s face, the merest flick of her eyelids acknowledging the insult. Belle now certainly expected to receive retribution from her father. She looked warily across at him, anticipating his usual explosion of rage. The situation certainly warranted it, he thought, but his stillness must have worried Belle more than the expected rage, for she turned and ran to the stairs door. She slammed it behind her, but it was not in her nature to leave any situation unexploited, and Sam cocked an eyebrow, waiting, then started as Belle shouted back, ‘Poor father. That’s all I can say - poor father!’
The words found a new vulnerability, a new dissatisfaction. It seemed to him that his daughter had succeeded in holding up the fabric of his life - and for the first time he saw it was full of rents and holes, and he could name each one… .
Belle had only just reached her bedroom when she heard someone follow her up the stairs. Moments later her mother came into the bedroom, threw a large, leather-strapped case on the bed and pointed to it, tight-lipped. Belle looked defiantly back at her, feeling she had experienced more emotional passion in the last half day than her mother probably had in all her life. She took stock of the older woman’s dark oatmeal-coloured skirt, cream blouse and inevitable apron, and thought her mother was about as exciting as unsalted, unsweetened porridge.
Something of her thoughts must have shown on her face, for words of retaliation sprang from Mabel’s lips. ‘Why, you brazen hussy! Looking at me like that! What’ve you been up to?’ There was both accusation and fear of the worst in her mother’s voice as she paused, almost panting, before a second wind of indignation sent her on again. ‘Running after that Abbott boy when you know how your father feels, what they’ve done to our property. You pack your bags, m’lady. We’ll be away before Saturday if I can manage it.’
Belle felt scornful of her mother and sensed she had hit home with her criticism, spoken and unspoken. And now her mother resorted to the oldest weapon in her armoury, blackmail that Belle’s actions would hurt her father. It had been a deterrent against Belle’s wilder moments ever since she could remember: ‘What will your father say?’ ‘Wait until your father gets in!’ ‘Be a good girl for your daddy.’ She gave a quiet snort of derision. Surely her mother didn’t think such a threat would stop her seeing Cato - or make her go to Derbyshire.
She knew, however, a feigned illness was not going to keep her at home this time. It had to be something quite drastic, like breaking a leg, she thought, or just not being around at the vital time of departure. She went to her window and pushed it wide open. The freshness of the rain after the months of drought made the earth give off a smell like damp cloth under a hot flat-iron. She remembered the night Cato had dared to come to her. Part of the reason for her love, she decided, was his daring - yet she had called him a coward. She sighed. Love was not a comfortable emotion, it was all peaks and hollows, but she would not fail him now. She would dare as much as he had — more. She woul
d find a way to go to him whatever the cost.
Her fingers curled and gripped the sill as she thought of Mordichi Evans; heavens knew she disliked the man, but he had paid part of the cost of the animosity between the two families. She winced as she remembered how the trap had closed on to the stake, the strength of the springs, the force with which it must have closed on flesh and bone. ‘Poor man!’ She drew in a long slow breath through her teeth and shuddered as she recalled the cries they had heard. ‘No wonder…’ she whispered, then the next moment hastily drew back from the window as her father walked across the lawn below.
A strange time for a walk, she thought. Usually he was supervising the swilling-down in the dairy, checking the horses, making sure the men knew which work to go to the next day. She watched his straight, stiff back, the even measure of his stride. It seemed to her he moved with Over-studied control; like a man striving not to be seen doing anything out of the ordinary - a stratagem she recognised.
Would a last appeal to him be of any use? He had been strangely silent during her mother’s harangue. Without another thought she ran from her room, down the stairs, through the kitchen. To her mother’s startled question, she called back, ‘I’m going to talk to Father,’ and ran on, ignoring her mother’s ‘It’ll do you no good.’
She almost knocked down Tweeny as the girl came from behind one of the wooden henhouses in the orchard. An empty feed bowl went flying from her fingers, but Tweeny beamed, her hand going to the neck of her dress, where the collar Belle had given her rested, grubby but giving a little air of femininity. She smiled broadly at Belle, showing an ample mouthful of broken and decayed teeth. ‘Boyfriend,’ she said, still patting the collar.
‘Oh, really,’ Belle said, raising her eyebrows, wondering quite what complications Tweeny was weaving for herself, but stooped to pick up the bowl and, pushing it back into Tweeny’s hands, added, ‘Well, don’t do anything, I wouldn’t do.’ Tweeny’s earthy giggle seemed to convey a breadth of understanding Belle found faintly disturbing, but she laughed and gave Tweeny a broad wink before hurrying on.
The delay had made her lose sight of her father. She hurried through the orchard to the land due for ploughing once it rained. She wondered if her father was inspecting it, but she could see nothing of him. At least she was out, she thought, and resolved to make the most of her opportunities. If she could not find her father, then she would try to contact Cato.
She calculated that if Mordichi Evans had got his way and if the Evanses were making use of the old basket-maker’s cottage, it was more than likely that Cato would have helped carry him there.
She kept a sharp look-out for her father for a time, but as she neared the osier beds she could smell wood-smoke and knew she had been right: the Evanses were here. Remembering the hedgehog they had invited her to share, she curled a lip; she certainly did not want cither of the sons to see her. She moved more cautiously and, as she first glimpsed the cottage, thought she saw a movement at the back and circled carefully that way.
A substantial new wooden lean-to had been built, the stout new frame making it look more durable and inviting than the cottage, whose sagging and blackened thatch told of decades of neglect. Belle moved nearer, bunches of leaves hung from the wooden roof of the new outhouse, strings of bryony berries, nets of acorns, roots and tubers protected from the rain but exposed to the passages of air to dry them. Fascinated, Belle drew closer, recognising one net of dandelion roots by some dead flowers and leaves still attached, but then she heard a movement inside and drew quickly back.
Meg Silver came out of the wooden annexe and placed a bowl on a chair near the doorway. There was a strange compelling concentration on her face, as if she was engaged in detailed calculation. She began to finger through the bunches of herbs, stripping the leaves from long stems of pennyroyal mint, probably to make her brew more palatable, Belle thought. Then Meg brought several small, grimy, fat-bellied jars to the chair, opening and adding a pinch of powdered leaves from each to the bowl. She straightened then, and seemed to glance around. Belle kept very still. Meg took from her bodice the bag of powder Belle had seen her use before. Very deliberately she loosened the thread and put in her finger, withdrew it with particles of powder on it and sucked the finger, beginning to hum and sing a little to herself. Then adding as much of the powder as would balance on her little finger tip to the bowl, she began to pound and work at it with a wooden pestle. Cradling the bowl on her knee she sat on the chair and rocked as she worked, her low singing sending a chill of distrust through Belle, like the pricking of unaccustomed hackles. She felt she was watching archaic black magic, not a herbal potion being prepared. She would have drawn quietly away, but suddenly Meg’s head came up, her eyes looking brilliant and wide, flashing like an animal’s caught in a sudden light at night.
‘What do you want, miss?’
For a second Belle was sure it could not be herself the woman was addressing, but as the eyes stared straight in her direction, she came out from the trees and stood facing Meg, feeling foolish that she had not gone straight to the door and made her enquiry direct. ‘I’m looking for Cato Abbott,’she said. ‘Is he here?’
‘No, but your father is.’ There was quiet spite in the information. ‘He stands watching at the front of the cottage, about as much concealed and as far away as his daughter was at the back. Tell him that if he wants me, I’ll be here.’ She made a gesture and Belle’s glance went to the interior of the wooden annexe. There was a small table, a shelf with a set of the dirty squat jars, a black cauldron such as gipsies hang from their trivets over a camp fire, and in the far corner a good thick pile of straw and blankets. Belle looked quickly back at the woman, the mockery in her eyes, the insinuation in her words and gesture.
‘Don’t worry, he won’t want you,’ she retorted.
The woman laughed, but added, ‘I’ll always take a message to Mr Cato if you want me to.’ There was too much assumption in her manner, too much knowledge in her eyes, and Belle remembered how disturbed Cato had been when they encountered her at the fair.
‘No thanks,’ she answered sharply.
‘Please yourself,’ Meg shrugged, ‘but don’t make an enemy of Meg Silver. You may need me before long.’
‘Cross your palm with silver, shall I?’ Belle asked.
Meg regarded her in silence for a moment, then nodded, ‘You could do worse,’ she said quietly, but Belle had already turned away, going deeper into the tangled osier-beds, making a wide, cautious sweep to see if Meg was telling the truth. She still intended to make her appeal to her father, but wanted to choose her moment; he would not like to be caught in the role of spy.
The trees grew close here. The great old pollarded willows, their tops like the straggled, unkempt hair of the ancients, were surrounded by self-seeded young trees. These wore their branches more elegantly, like tutus of varying lengths, but all were of the same shades of seared yellow, and each leaf gathered and released its own watershed; ponderously dipping, relinquishing, springing -
Belle was soon almost as wet as she had been in the storm. She shivered as she ran her hands over her saturated shoulders and sleeves, suddenly impatient with this place of stealthy observation and ancient mysterious remedies taken from filthy bottles and pouches. The doctor had been right to protest, she decided. A man’s leg, or even his life, was being dallied with.
She had momentarily forgotten her father, and with a start she realised she was walking straight towards where he stood. His very stillness deceived her, his brown jacket and trousers blending with the autumn tones. She caught her breath and stood motionless until she was sure he had not heard her approach, but he was intent on all that was happening at the cottage.
Cautiously Belle took a pace further back, then her eye too was captured by movement as the younger Evans son, Will, came out carrying a wooden bucket. He lifted a stone cover at ground level, and tying a length of rope to the bucket threw it down a well. As he stooped waiting for it to fill, M
eg came to the doorway and stood watching, saying a few low words as he carried the water inside. Meg stepped out and closed the door after Will. Then, taking a few steps more out into the centre of the small clearing before the cottage, she proceeded to take a comb from her skirt and draw it up, under and through her thick black hair.
A movement, no more perhaps than a tensing of muscles, a heightening of interest, made her look back at her father. So rapt was his attention now, she was sure she could have walked right up to him and he would not have noticed.
She too grudgingly appreciated the polished enticement of the performance, thinking it could have been an entertainment to enliven a Romany’s campfire, a symbolic dance of female enticing male. She could imagine the shouts of approval, the applause. The comb became a mere cipher as the woman pushed both hands upwards through and over her hair, stretching her arms high and moving hands and fingers to brush and entwine, before, with pretence of smoothing bodice and skirt, running her hands down over her own breasts and hips with unnatural self-appreciation.
‘You provocative bitch,’ Belle breathed to herself, but she did not intend to let her father be made a fool of. She shouted at the top of her voice, ‘Dadda! Dadda! She knows you’re there! She’s doing it for you!’
She ran, scrambled, towards him, then as quickly stopped. He tore his gaze from the woman and looked in the direction of the shout, but did not seem to understand what she had said or recognise her. There was a darkness in his eyes such as a daughter should not sec. Instinctively Belle raised her hands in a protective gesture as he stared, still unable to believe his eyes and cars. He glanced back at Meg, who stood still now, hands on hips, brazen as ever, then turned back to his daughter. A cry escaped him that was like a hurt but vengeful animal. Belle turned and ran.
11
Belle ran as hard as she could, yet knew by the absence of any sound other than her own headlong flight that she was not being pursued. What she ran from was more intimate, struck more to her roots. She wanted to escape from the look in her father’s eyes that had made her the intruder, the child meddling in an adult world.