Mud and Gold

by Shayne Parkinson

  ‘I haven’t had those in years,’ Jack said. ‘I don’t think I’ve had them since you went away.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll give the recipe to Sophie—no, I won’t,’ Amy amended. ‘That way I can talk you into coming and visiting me a bit more often.’

  Arthur was still leaning against the tree trunk, sipping his beer. Amy saw her uncle cast an occasional irritated glance in Charlie’s direction. He took a step or two closer and made a comment on the weather, which Charlie did not answer. After a short silence, Arthur spoke again.

  ‘Go a bit easy on the drink, eh, Charlie,’ he said with a joviality that was clearly forced. ‘Leave some for the rest of us.’

  Charlie muttered something that Amy did not catch. He drained his mug, but made no move to fill it again.

  ‘That’s right, let one lot hit bottom before you send the next one down to join it,’ Arthur said. He topped up his own mug and leaned against the tree trunk again. ‘If you kept downing it at that rate you might find your wife having to carry you home.’

  Charlie looked grimly at Arthur, then shot a black look in Amy’s direction. She turned her head away, but not before she had seen him shape the word ‘bitch’ at her.

  ‘Hey, hey, there’s no need for that sort of talk,’ Arthur remonstrated. ‘I think you’ve had enough for one night.’ His eyes flicked to Amy just long enough for her to see the sympathy in them, then he scowled at Charlie, his face full of disgust. Amy realised with a jolt that her father must have told Arthur about the beating.

  ‘She’s a bitch,’ Charlie said, his voice easily reaching Amy and her three companions. ‘Sour-faced little tart. She’s—’

  ‘That’s enough, Charlie,’ Jack said. ‘Speak to my daughter with a bit of respect or keep your mouth shut. I’ll shut it for you if you don’t.’

  Amy reached out and put her hand over his. ‘It’s all right,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t take any notice.’

  ‘I’m not going to listen to him talking to you like that, girl.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Pa,’ Amy said. She squeezed her father’s hand. ‘It’s only talk, nothing else. Nothing else,’ she repeated. ‘Words don’t hurt, not really.’ She looked over her father’s shoulder to see Charlie muttering to himself, but his eyes shied away from Jack’s and he said nothing audible.

  ‘I think perhaps we’d better go home now,’ Amy said. She turned to Lizzie and Jane to see them both looking a little shaken as well as, in Lizzie’s case, furious. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told them; but it was not an apology, merely an expression of regret that the other women had had to witness the unpleasant scene. ‘Now, where are those boys of mine?’

  ‘I don’t want to see you going off by yourself with him,’ Jack fretted.

  Amy slid out from under his arm and took both his hands in hers. ‘Pa, you mustn’t worry about me,’ she said, looking up into his troubled eyes. ‘It’s all right, I promise it is. He won’t do anything but talk, and he won’t even do that for much longer tonight. He’ll go to sleep as soon as I get him home, then in the morning he’ll wake up with a sore head feeling sorry for himself.’

  She planted a kiss on her father’s cheek and stood up. ‘Come and see me tomorrow, I’ll be expecting you. Bye bye, Jane, and you too, Lizzie—don’t look so fierce, Lizzie!’ She kissed them both and went searching for her children, whom she found sleeping in a corner of the verandah.

  Leading a drowsy child with each hand, she walked up to Charlie. ‘Do you want to go home now?’ she asked.

  Charlie glanced from Arthur to Jack, who were both glowering darkly at him, and it was obvious even to him that if he did not take the opportunity Amy held out of leaving with some dignity the two men would take great pleasure in evicting him, and quite possibly keeping his wife and sons behind.

  ‘Aye, we’ll go now,’ he said. ‘Hurry up.’

  ‘We’re ready now.’ She turned to wave to her father, then walked off beside Charlie.

  For once it was not hard for her to match his pace. The beer was taking its toll; he had to put much of his attention into treading at all steadily. They walked in silence, and Amy concentrated on guiding the sleepy little boys’ steps, carrying David for the last stretch up the track to Charlie’s cottage.

  She led the boys through to their bedroom and undressed them. Both children were half asleep by the time she had tucked them in; she even managed to steal a kiss from Malcolm. While she got the children into bed she listened for the sound of Charlie making his own way through the house, but she did not hear him come any closer than the kitchen. So he was going to be silly; it was no more than she had expected from the way he had behaved at her uncle’s.

  She closed the boys’ door softly, then went through the parlour and into the kitchen. Sure enough, Charlie was sitting at the table. He had lit a candle and stuck it roughly into a candlestick; Amy corrected its precarious angle before speaking.

  ‘Pa’s coming over tomorrow,’ she said, as if it were of only slight interest. ‘Do you want something, Charlie?’ She spoke in the same calm voice she had used to him earlier. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea if you like.’

  ‘Bitch,’ he muttered. ‘Miserable little bitch.’

  ‘I mixed the bread this afternoon before we went out, so I’ve no need to sit up now. But I’ll make you some tea if you want. And would you like a biscuit? Or maybe a sandwich? What would you like?’

  ‘I want my rights, that’s what.’

  ‘Charlie, I’ve said all I’m going to about rights. There’s no sense going on and on about it. Now, if you don’t want me to get you any supper I’m going to bed.’ She took a candle from a shelf and lit it from the one on the table. ‘Do you want any supper or not?’

  ‘Dirty little whore. You’re a useless, good-for-nothing trollop.’

  ‘I’m not listening, Charlie.’ She walked across the room, shielding her candle from the draught with one hand.

  ‘Stupid bitch of a woman. Sour, tight little bitch.’

  Amy went through her bedroom door and looked back at him. ‘Good night.’ She shut the door on the sight of his scowling face.

  28

  December 1891

  The hangover he woke with the morning after Bill and Lily’s wedding left Charlie rather subdued all that day, but he had fully recovered from his overindulgence by the following Sunday, when Bill and Lily made their first appearance at church as a married couple. As she watched the newly-weds talking to well-wishers after the service Amy noticed the way their fingers sought excuses to brush against each other’s hands and arms, and she smiled to herself. Bill and Lily were happy, and they did not mind the world’s knowing it.

  Amy saw Charlie cast a scowl over his shoulder at Bill and Lily as he started the gig homewards. He’s jealous. He’s thinking about Bill and Lily, and what they’ve been doing at night. I hope he’s not going to carry on silly again.

  ‘She’s nothing to look at,’ Charlie muttered.

  ‘Lily’s very nice,’ said Amy.

  Charlie directed his scowl at her instead of at Bill and Lily, over the heads of the two boys squeezed between them. ‘Aye, maybe she is. Not a sour little tart like some.’

  ‘What’s a tart, Mama?’ David asked, looking up at her expectantly.

  ‘It’s something nice to eat, Davie,’ Amy said. ‘It’s like a pie with no top. I might make an apple tart for pudding tomorrow—I’ll put lots of sugar in, then it won’t be sour.’ Charlie scowled more fiercely than ever, but said nothing more about tarts, sour or otherwise.

  Amy was up at five o’clock the next morning to start the weekly washing. She paused from hauling piles of steaming hot clothes between the tubs to get morning tea ready, calling Malcolm and David down from the tree they were playing in as she walked back to the cottage.

  Charlie was already sitting at the table when she went into the kitchen with the boys. She expected him to complain at having been kept waiting a few minutes, but he seemed too busy rummaging in his pockets to take
much notice of their arrival. She put the kettle on to boil and got the tea things ready.

  Charlie brought his hands out of his pockets and formed a small heap of coins on the table in front of him. He muttered his calculations aloud as he laboriously counted the coins, then counted them again, clearly dissatisfied with the first answer.

  ‘I thought I had more than that,’ he grumbled to himself. ‘I’ll have to go to the bloody bank, try and talk that miserable beggar of a manager into letting me have a bit until the cream cheque comes.’ He began to count the coins a third time.

  Amy poured the tea, and put his cup beside the small pile. She took her own seat at the other end of the table. As she let one hand drop into her lap she felt a small lump in the pocket of her apron.

  ‘These were in your trousers,’ she said, pulling out the two coins she had found when checking Charlie’s pockets before hurling his trousers into the copper. She placed the coins before him. ‘A sixpence and a threepenny bit.’

  Charlie snatched at the coins and added them to his little hoard. ‘That should do it,’ he said, studying the pile with some complacency.

  ‘What do you want money for?’ Amy asked, taking a sip of her tea. It was rarely that she saw cash; the provisions of the household were always bought on credit at the store.

  ‘Mind your own business, nosy bitch,’ was all the reply he gave her, but remembering his mood of the day before it was no great surprise to Amy when Charlie, having finished his tea, pushed back his chair and announced that he was going into town.

  ‘I see,’ Amy said, clearing away the cups without looking at him. The boys hovered around her as she stepped over to the bench, eager to beg another biscuit each. So whores have to be paid in cash, do they? ‘I suppose you’ll have lunch there?’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘Can I come, Pa?’ Malcolm asked.

  ‘No, you can’t,’ said Charlie.

  ‘But I want to. I want to go with you. Why do I have to stay with her?’

  ‘Don’t you whine at me, boy,’ Charlie growled. Malcolm had the sense to take a step backwards out of his father’s range. He did not dare complain again in Charlie’s hearing, but his face wore a black scowl.

  ‘I wanted to go with Pa,’ he muttered when Charlie had gone outside to catch his horse.

  ‘Well, you can’t,’ said Amy. ‘Don’t pull such awful faces, Mal, the wind might change and you’ll be stuck like that. Now, don’t get under my feet, I’ve got to get the washing finished.’

  She went outside, the two boys trailing after her. Charlie had saddled up his bay gelding and was mounting. As she watched he rode away without looking back at them.

  ‘I wonder why he’s not riding Smokey,’ Amy remarked. The grey was always Charlie’s preferred mount.

  ‘Smokey’s a bit stiff, so Pa doesn’t want to ride him far today. Pa told me that when we were milking yesterday afternoon,’ Malcolm said, full of self-importance. ‘You don’t know anything about horses.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that, Mal. I used to ride every day when I was little, I know more about horses than you do.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Malcolm said. ‘You’re just a silly bitch.’

  Amy turned on her heel, took hold of Malcolm by the sleeve and gave him a slap on the bottom. ‘Don’t you dare say that to me,’ she told the startled child. ‘I don’t ever want to hear language like that from you again.’

  Malcolm stared at her, astonished. ‘Pa calls you that,’ he said indignantly. ‘He says it all the time.’

  ‘Your father can do—’ she stopped to correct herself, ‘can say whatever he likes to me. He’s a grown man, and this is his house. But you can just behave yourself.’

  It did not take Malcolm long to regain his composure. ‘Anyway, that didn’t even hurt. You can’t even do hidings. Silly bitch.’ His expression told Amy he was daring her to hit him again.

  She gazed back at him and sighed, resigning herself to defeat. He looked so startlingly like his father when he scowled at her like that, but Malcolm was not Charlie, and she had no right to treat him as though he was.

  It was one thing to assert her rights with Charlie; he had chosen to marry her, he was a grown man, and he had to bear the consequences of having gone too far in his treatment of her. She would give him what duty she still owed him, and give it ungrudgingly.

  But she owed Malcolm more than mere duty; he was her son as well as Charlie’s, born out of her body, and she owed him love. Always at the back of her mind when she thought of Malcolm was a vague feeling of guilt that she did not love him as much as she should. It was not his fault that his parents had married with no trace of affection between them, and it was not his fault that he bore his father’s face. However much he might hurt her, she could not bear to hurt Malcolm in return.

  ‘Please yourself, then, Mal,’ she said. ‘Just don’t let your father hear you talking like that—even if he does say it himself, that doesn’t mean he’ll let you.’

  She walked the rest of the way to her copper and tubs, the boys ambling along in her wake. ‘Why don’t you two go and climb trees again?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t want to,’ Malcolm said, more because she had suggested it than from any real disinclination, Amy suspected.

  ‘You’re in a real mood, aren’t you? All right, then, don’t. Stand around here and watch me do the washing if that’s more fun.’

  ‘I want to climb trees, Mal,’ David protested.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Malcolm said. He went off readily enough with David, leaving Amy free to finish off the last load of washing in peace.

  Now that the day had reached its full heat the sun beat fiercely on her despite her wide-brimmed straw hat, plastering her hair down with perspiration and making her head ache. She had often wished Charlie would build a roof over the copper and tubs wide enough to shelter her from the sun, but she knew it would be no use asking him.

  She hung the last of the clothes out to dry and stood for a moment enjoying the shade of the tree that one end of her clothesline was attached to. Close to the tree trunk Ginger was sprawled luxuriously, almost invisible against the dry ground there. Amy paused to stroke his warm fur, feeling the rumbling purr deep within him, then headed back to the house. She glanced over at the small stand of trees where the children had been playing earlier, but there was no sign of the boys. Weary from her morning’s labour, at first she did no more than wonder idly where else they might have gone. As she remembered Malcolm’s defiant mood a vague foreboding crept over her. Just what was that boy up to?

  ‘Mal?’ she called. ‘Where are you? Davie? Mal?’ There was no answer, and with an inward groan she set off in search of them.

  The snort of a horse caught her attention as she passed the house and started down the track. She stopped for a moment and listened, then walked quickly in the direction of the sound.

  The boys had climbed onto the fence of the horse paddock, and Malcolm had attracted Smokey over with a few small carrots filched from Amy’s garden. The horse snatched at the carrots, coming right up to the fence to get at them. Giving Charlie’s horse a treat was a harmless enough activity, but something about Malcolm’s stance made Amy stand and watch the boys instead of turning away and leaving them to it.

  Dangling one of the carrots just out of Smokey’s reach, Malcolm clambered onto a fence post, waving his arms until he had his balance and could stand upright. He let Smokey take the carrot, then as Amy watched Malcolm darted out and caught hold of Smokey’s mane with both hands and flung himself onto the horse’s back.

  For a few moments Amy was too startled to move, then she gathered up her skirts and ran the rest of the way to the horse paddock. ‘Malcolm!’ she called. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing? Get off there!’

  ‘Mal’s riding Papa’s horse!’ David squealed.

  ‘Mal’s a naughty boy,’ Amy said, unsure whether to feel angry or anxious. ‘He’s no business getting on Papa’s horse by himself when he doe
sn’t even know how to ride. Malcolm!’

  But Malcolm was too busy keeping his precarious seat to take any notice of her. He clutched a fistful of mane in each hand and gripped tightly with his knees, kicking the horse with all his might. Smokey had looked aggrieved when he had been unexpectedly mounted; as Malcolm dug in his ankles the horse’s ears went back and he broke into an awkward trot. Malcolm bounced up and down on the bony back, but his hands kept their hold on Smokey’s mane and he clung limpet-like with his knees.

  ‘Gee up,’ he urged the horse. ‘Go faster! I want to gallop!’

  Malcolm’s eyes were flashing with excitement. It was no use calling out to him; he was beyond hearing her, even if he had been likely to take any notice. So Amy stood close to the excited David, keeping a tight hold of the little boy’s hand in case he decided to dart into the paddock after his brother, and waited to see how Malcolm’s wild ride would end.

  He did not manage to persuade Smokey into a gallop, or even a canter. Instead Smokey’s trot became faster and more jolting, his ears flat to his head, until the horse decided he had had enough of this unpleasant little burden who kept kicking at his sides so uncomfortably.

  It took Amy a moment to realise what was happening when she saw Smokey lower his head, then she shouted a warning.

  ‘He’s going to buck, Mal! Let go his mane and jump. Go on, jump off now!’

  Instead Malcolm clung on tighter, but he had no chance of keeping his seat when Smokey lashed out with his hind legs. It only took a few good bucks till Malcolm went flying over the top of the horse’s head to land in a heap on the grass.

  Amy was over the fence and at Malcolm’s side before she knew she had moved. She dropped to her knees beside him and reached out to touch his face, her heart pounding at the sight of his still form.

  ‘Mal?’ she said, her voice shaking with fear. ‘Talk to me, Mal!’

  Malcolm’s mouth hung open, his face dazed. He took a great gulp of air and his eyes lit up. ‘Did you see me riding him? That was neat.’ He made to sit up, but his mouth twisted into a grimace.