The Forbidden Path

by Jean Chapman

  ‘I hid the gun,’ she began, then pushing past him she ran downstairs - but the case of the grandfather clock was empty. ‘He’d go to the path, Levi, I’m sure.’ Levi stood a moment, swaying a little, then reached for his jacket from the back of a chair. ‘I’ll catch you up,’ she said, running back upstairs. She threw her clothes on, pulled on a pair of boots from against the kitchen door and sped after Levi.

  The sky was just beginning to lighten into a pale grey dawn. A heavy sheen of misty dew splashed up and wet her skirts as she ran. Belle soon caught and passed Levi on the rising meadows, but reaching the path, seeing for the first time the deep ruts of the plough, brought her up short.

  Levi came panting up. ‘You go along there, I’ll go this way,’ she instructed, and would have set off, but Levi raised a hand to stay her.

  ‘Wait!’ he ordered. ‘Listen!’ Belle thought she could hear something, but wasn’t sure what, then as Levi’s breathing cased he recognised it. ‘It’s the dog whining… off to the right.’ Belle gave a shiver of apprehension. She opened her mouth to say that if anything had happened to her father, it would be more than she could bear. Levi held up a hand that calmed and instructed her not to start imagining anything, and he led the way now. ‘Come quietly - we mustn’t startle him.’ She did not voice what she knew must be in Levi’s mind too - the dread they might already be too late, that the dog’s whine might be an elegy for its lost master.

  They moved as quickly and as cautiously as they could, but both of them slipped continually on the mist-moistened soil, having to put their hands down to save themselves. Belle was beginning a stitch in her side, when Levi put back a hand to stop her. They stood breathing through their mouths to lessen the noise they were making, and Levi cautiously pointed forward.

  Belle could make out nothing, and it was not until Gyp whined pitifully again that she saw her father. She would have started forward immediately, but Levi’s arm stayed her. Her father was sitting down, his back to a great elm which still held its foliage in a great seared yellow canopy, but it was the gun that riveted her attention. This he held propped between his feet, the barrel towards his forehead. Even as she watched, the dog whined again and bellied forward.

  ‘Keep back! Go home, Gyp!’ her father ordered, and there was that note of normality and a note of intention in his command that broke her spell. She pushed past Levi and launched herself at her father, shouting at him.

  ‘No, no! Don’t do it, Father! Please, please…. ‘

  Her appearance startled him. For a moment he seemed to reach for the trigger, but his gun had slipped out of alignment and she was on him, throwing her arms around his neck before he could do more.

  ‘Dadda! Dadda! Don’t, please don’t leave me! I love you, Dadda! Please, please, come back to me, hold me.’

  For a moment, shock or despair seemed to keep Sam’s hands lying motionless, like someone mortally sick. She sensed him touch the very depths of desolation, and pressed her smooth cheek to his, a child trying to nuzzle against the harsh prickle of her father’s unshaven jaw. Then with a great agonised intake of breath he clasped her to him, his hands both rubbing into her hair and holding her face next to him. She felt his tears on her checks, and hers mingling with his.

  Levi bent and picked up the gun and, jerking his head to the attentive dog, turned and began to walk back to the farm. The dog, after one last anxious glance at its master, shook itself and followed the old man.

  ‘Why, Belle, why?’ Her father at last struggled to his feet, gripping her hand as if it was indeed a life line as he asked, ‘Why did I plough that path just at that time?’

  ‘Why did my mother decide to ride your mare? It must have been the only impulsive thing she ever did in her life.’

  He did not answer, and eager not to let him fall into introspection again she indicated the ground and said, ‘Perhaps it was an appeal for help, perhaps it was something you had to do.’

  She watched him closely, and when he turned to look at her she saw grief but reason in his eyes, although she did not understand when he said wearily, ‘Yes, I did have to do it… I found two lost children.’ And as he rested his arm across her shoulders and they began to walk back towards the farm, she thought he must mean Harry, and she was glad for him, put her arm around his waist and dropped her head back on his shoulder.

  ‘I’ve a long way to go,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yes, but not alone, Dadda.’

  Cato wrote from the Longs’ caravan, saying he was after all travelling with them until Christmas, and would then be towing their broken engine back to his father’s yard for repair. ‘Christmas,’ she exclaimed aloud, ‘that’s weeks and weeks away!’ Then she felt the tone of his letter became guarded - but he had news. His father had offered to give them a piece of land and supply the materials for Cato to build a house. His brother John would help with the work… she gasped with delight, pausing in her reading to realise that this must have been what Joe Abbott had meant when he had said Cato knew his feelings about them. She had thought it just more condemnation but, like the news about the path, Cato had kept it to himself until he thought the time was ripe. There was yet another surprise, for the next paragraph told her that Cato intended to come home the following weekend and approach her father formally for her hand in marriage. ‘I shall come on Saturday evening,’ he had written.

  Her heart skittered madly, and she ran, letter in hand, across the yard to where she thought Levi was working alone in the stables, shouting her news as she went. ‘What shall I do?’ she asked.

  Levi pushed back his cap, and with the briefest movement of his head indicated the far stall. The next moment her father came out, leading one of his shire horses. ‘Dadda?’ she queried, as she followed him out into the yard.

  ‘I’ll make a start setting the winter wheat in the leaside land, Levi,’ he said, and when she would have appealed again Levi shook his head at her. They watched him go.

  ‘Give him time,’ Levi murmured, ‘give him time. It’s too much all at once… .’

  ‘But Cato is coming on Saturday! What shall I do about that?’

  ‘Put on a good supper - like your mother would have done.’

  Just how much her mother had done and organised Belle only now began to realise. She was continually finding things that had her fighting back tears and made her understand how much her mother’s form of love and caring had taken practical lines: a sock with the needle still woven across a half-finished darn; the Christmas cake on the pantry thrall, ready for piercing with a skewer and impregnating with regular doses of brandy; but the worst moment of all was when Belle found a tissue-wrapped parcel near the bottom of her mother’s work-basket. She opened it out and found it was a partly worked shawl, and realised her mother must have intended it for Tweeny’s baby. Belle held it close in her arms; this was when she was going to miss her mother most, when her own babies came… there would have been so much to share then. She rocked over the warm lacy thing, wondering if she could ever finish it and, if she did, whether she could bring herself to part with the shawl.

  Tweeny, she knew, must be very near her time, and was unlikely to come to the farm again - according to her elder sister Mary, who seemed somewhat disgruntled by the attention Tweeny’s affairs were getting in the Alsopp household. Belle wondered whether it would be a good time to approach her father about having Mary as a living-in help.

  She sought Levi’s reassurance about her father many times during that week. The old man was sure that Sam was finding release in the work he was throwing himself into - ploughing, sowing, sheep-dipping, returning to the house each night too tired to do anything but throw himself into bed. Levi advised her to leave the subject of Cato alone. ‘Gaffer’ll come to his own decision, in his own time — no use you trying to push him.’ She almost tossed her nose at his familiar note of knowing best, but stopped herself. ‘You’ll do,’ Levi approved, his smile gentle.

  As Saturday approached, Belle took heart from
the fact that her father had in no way vetoed Cato’s visit. She began instead to feel all the nervousness of a young housekeeper about to entertain the most important person in her life. Mary, she found, had a liking for polishing, putting almost a spite into it, Belle thought, as she watched this older, more talkative version of Tweeny attacking the huge brass log-box, while she tackled hand-raising a pork-pie — like so much else, it had all looked so simple.

  Even for all her preparations the knock on the front door at barely four o’clock on Saturday found them unprepared. Her father had just come in from his old routine of a Saturday afternoon walk around the farm, and had gone upstairs, and Belle was still in a large white apron making a batch of scones. She felt quite flustered by the summons and flew to open the door, her impulsive skip forward to throw herself into Cato’s arms only half stayed by the formality of Cato in dark suit, bowler hat in hand. She had barely pulled him over the threshold and tried to brush the flour from him, when she heard her father coming downstairs, and saw with surprise that he too had put on his best suit. Sam reached the bottom of the stairs and paused.

  ‘Mr Greenaugh.’ Cato greeted him formally, holding his hat to cover the worst of the white hand-marks on his suit.

  Belle held her breath, then slowly Sam raised his hand. ‘Cato Abbott,’ he said, as they shook hands, then tutted as Belle bounced forward again and attempted to put her arms around both of them. Sam made a great show of brushing himself down, ‘Go and spend at least ten minutes making us some tea, while I talk to Cato.’

  ‘Oh, I wanted… I thought… .’ She looked at their faces, shrugged and turned away into the kitchen. She had to let the men think they were making the decisions, she supposed.

  Cato looked at case and happy when the two finally came to the supper table. It was agreed, they announced, that as soon as the house was built Cato and Belle should marry. ‘In April,’ Belle said. ‘28 April, my birthday - it is a Saturday.’ Both men opened their mouths in astonishment.

  ‘It seems we’ve been wasting our time — it’s already decided,’ Sam said. Belle thought her father too looked different, not relaxed exactly, nothing as definite as that, more as it some of the inner tension had gone, but it made him look curiously more gaunt, and older.

  Belle came to think her father had deteriorated even more as the winter progressed. He was certainly much thinner, for not only did he insist on working on the land for long hours, but used every hour of daylight left to walk the path to the site of the cottage being built for his daughter. Here he, Joe, John and Cato worked out a new harmony. Belle appealed to him to rest, but he had set it as a personal goal that the cottage should be habitable by the time the wedding date arrived. There were many days when Belle shook her head about him as he fell asleep over his meals, and looked too tired to hold himself upright.

  The arrangements for the wedding grew in scale as time went on. From being a simple affair when first planned, in keeping with the bereaved state of the family, by the time April came, it had grown into as interesting an affair locally as the wedding on Thursday, 26 April, 1923, of His Royal Highness the Duke of York to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.

  The interest, the guest list and the complications grew. The Langtons, with the exception of Ben, descended on Hall Farm again. It helped that Mary Alsopp had readily agreed to come as a living-in help, but by the Friday afternoon Belle was looking for ways to escape from the house.

  Her father had gone off with Gyp some time before, and when her aunt began the umpteenth check of the timetable for the next morning, Belle walked sedately and discreetly out of the kitchen, past the clothes line, through the orchard and over the stile into the fields. Then, with an explosion of energy and excitement, she ran, ran, all the way uphill towards the path.

  Reaching it, she was immediately distracted by the sight of her father some little way off, talking to a woman. Belle walked slowly forward, and spoke aloud as the shock of recognition hit her. ‘Meg Silver!’ It was the gipsy woman, yet there was something different about her - a kind of mellowing? There was something unexplained too about their self-consciousness, their awkwardness, as they became aware of her approach — as if caught out. Belle found herself thinking they were like lovers meeting illicitly.

  ‘I’ll be giving my condolences to you about your mother,’ Meg said as Belle drew near to them, and Belle felt she was right: the woman was different. The arrogance had gone from her manner; Meg had mellowed and, glancing up at her father, Belle saw a kind of protectiveness, and a kind of possessiveness, in his eyes, such as she never remembered seeing when he had looked at her mother. Then she realised Meg was still speaking to her ‘… and for the part I had in causing your troubles, I’m sorry.’

  Sam raised his hands, expressive of their irretrievable loss - and letting them fall, signified the futility of words.

  As if by mutual agreement the three turned and walked on together. Belle learned that now the fear of any action being taken by the law had lessened, Meg had risked coming back with the Evanses, and was still nursing Mordichi, who could now get about with a crutch. ‘He’ll never walk unaided, but Mr Abbott’ll always find him and his sons a living.’

  Meg decided to leave them at the next stile, to make her way over the fields to the osier beds. They stood and watched her go for a moment or two, then her father said, ‘And I’ve a message for Levi from your aunt, about the times for the horse and carriage tomorrow.’

  She caught his sleeve as he turned, and reached up and kissed his cheek. ‘I’ll always love you, Dadda, and never be far away from you.’ Then she half frowned as she sought for the right words. ‘And whatever you want to do will always be all right with me.’

  ‘That makes having to take you up the aisle tomorrow much easier.’ He bent to kiss her cheek. ‘I still can’t really bear the thought of “giving my daughter away”.’

  She stood and watched her father walk back along the path. The comings and goings of the winter, backwards and forwards to the new cottage, had broken and flattened the plough. She noticed too for the first time how nature was again taking over the narrow strip of land. Grasses, plantains, the bright purple-blue flowers of ground ivy, the clover-shaped leaves and white flowers of wood sorrel, all were insinuating their way across the path. ‘A new beginning,’ Belle breathed.

  She trod softly as she walked, careful not to disturb any of the new growth, then a low whistle made her look up, and she saw Cato coming from the opposite direction. She lifted her skirt from her knees and, careless now of anything, ran to him. She felt he stood as strong and powerful as one of his steam-engines as he stopped and opened his arms for her, and she threw herself into them. His arms closed and crossed over her, whirling her around until the new springing greens of the hedges seemed to encircle their love tight in the path’s springtime.