by Amy Myers
‘But Jamie Thorn isn’t feckless.’
Tilly ignored this, bent on her own thoughts now. ‘We can own property, more and more women are working. Some go to university, some are typists, even bank clerks now. Even the lot of the women in the sweatshops will improve. Society is a snail, but it will get there in the end.’
‘Too late to help Ruth and Agnes.’
‘The Ruths and Agneses of this world are in a sense immaterial –’ Tilly broke off hastily, seeing Caroline’s appalled face. ‘Here in Ashden, of course, they are far from immaterial. If something goes amiss here, it slows down the wheel of life until it is mended. Just like my Austin,’ she added, to lighten the tone. But Caroline shivered; the temperature had dropped now, and spring no longer blew so gently.
‘I have been considering whether or not Jamie is the father,’ Tilly continued carefully.
‘Father asks why else Ruth would have named him.’
‘Suppose the real father were disinclined?’
‘And that she may have thought Jamie was so gentle he’d give way immediately under pressure?’ Caroline was interested. ‘Aunt Tilly, surely Ruth needs evidence? Has she any?’
‘In Ashden,’ Tilly pointed out drily, ‘rumours fly without wheels and settle as judgements.’
‘I want to talk to Ruth. I’m going now.’
Tilly considered this. Could it help? It could do no harm. ‘I’ll come. I’ll talk to Nanny.’
Nanny greeted them suspiciously; their visits were not usually quite so frequent. ‘Ruth?’ She looked from one to the other. ‘Don’t you go upsetting her, Miss Caroline, I’m just getting her trained. Those Swinford-Brownes don’t seem to have taught her anything. Fancy putting linen sheets on the bed and me with my rheumatism! Mind you, she’s never going to make a parlourmaid. A general, that’s her limit. No interest in their work nowadays, that’s the trouble with young gels. She’s supposed to have put the pie in,’ she banged the hearth with her stick for emphasis, ‘half an hour ago and I don’t smell nothing yet.’
Thanks to Father’s help, an efficient oil-heated Excelsior kitchener stood in the scullery, and the cottage had its own well, which was more than many of these cottages did. Caroline went through to find Ruth. A flat iron was warming on the kitchener, though Nanny’s ironing day was always Tuesday. A basket of clean washing waited patiently in a corner next to the copper. The hip bath hung above her head, ready for the ritual Friday night bath tonight. The pie, however, was a long way from ready. A bucket, used for storing dairy foods in the well to keep them cool, stood on the draining board, while Ruth slowly and incompetently peeled apples in the stone sink. The pastry dough on the scrubbed table was apparently left to roll itself. Caroline rolled up her sleeves. Elizabeth was an expert pastry-maker and had insisted on all her daughters being equally proficient, on the grounds that it would stand them in good stead whether they made their lives in palace or pantry. Only with Isabel had she totally failed.
‘Morning, miss.’ Ruth greeted her guardedly. With her auburn hair and heavy-lidded eyes she would have been handsome if her face had been less sullen and her stance less drooping with resignation. She had always been so and the current crisis had not improved matters. Her waist was noticeably thickening.
‘Come to plead on Agnes’s behalf, have you?’ Ruth continued without malice. She looked pale, and Caroline suddenly felt sorry for the girl. She might dislike her, but Ruth was quite definitely in trouble. In a way Ruth reminded her a little of Phoebe but she had an instinct for self-survival that Phoebe, her sister suspected, lacked. Ruth had, Caroline reminded herself, found her way to Nanny Oates’ haven in very little time.
‘Come to help get your pie in the oven first.’ Caroline set about the dough with the rolling pin.
‘You want to know whether it were Jamie or not,’ Ruth continued plaintively. ‘Why does everyone think I’d make a mistake over Jamie? He courted me, told me Agnes were a dull old stick. No fun, and Jamie likes fun. He took it and now he can pay for it.’
‘It seems so out of character. They were planning to marry soon, and to move into Ebenezer Thorn’s cottage.’
She saw Ruth’s eyes shift suddenly. ‘So I heard. Well, now it’s going to be Jamie and me. That’s where we did our courting,’ Ruth added nonchalantly.
‘In the cottage?’ Caroline was aghast.
‘It were January. Hardly likely we’d romp around in the fields, is it? Love don’t keep you that warm, miss. Ebenezer pops into the Norville Arms most nights, so Jamie and me slips in the back and no one’s the wiser, certainly not the old gentleman. You should have heard Jamie laugh. Ebenezer never uses his parlour and there’s nice old sofa there. That cottage will do me nicely, and you can tell Agnes I said so,’ she ended up triumphantly.
Caroline got no further, indeed she seemed to have moved backwards, for there was now an explanation as to why no one had seen Ruth and Jamie together. They had only to cross the field behind the almshouses and they could enter the cottage from the rear path. Her lack of progress and the seeming impossibility of Agnes’s plight left her deeply uneasy, as she walked back to luncheon leaving Aunt Tilly with Nanny. She just could not see Jamie stealing in to the back of a cottage with a girl he did not love, not just to kiss and cuddle, but to create a baby.
Caroline found herself almost stumbling up the driveway and in at the ever-open door of the Rectory. Within the safety of these walls, with the voices of her sisters coming faintly from the morning room, the smell of lunch, and her mother’s laugh as she talked to Mrs Dibble, normality restored itself. This was solid ground, no matter what might lie outside.
Rector’s Hour had taken longer than usual this evening, and Caroline suspected Father’s last problem had been Aunt Tilly since both looked remarkably flushed when they entered for dinner. From the way Mother looked at them she obviously thought the same. Caroline knew she’d never hear about it, not from her parents, anyway. Sometimes, she decided, there were distinct disadvantages to being young and unmarried. Why did everyone think she had to be protected against the world? She had to live in it, after all, and yet Mother seemed to think anything to do with their minds above household affairs and fairy stories or their bodies below their chins was an unfit subject for discussion. Even their chins had to be protected against spring winds. It had been Nanny’s job to initiate them into the mysteries of puberty, but the general messiness of being a woman she had learned about from her schoolfriends, and then in turn herself became an instructress, based on the fine art of theory.
Dinner was always, or nearly always, by common assent a time at which they were encouraged to talk over the day’s events. Problems were left for morning or luncheon, as were politics and putting the world to rights, So whatever it was he had been arguing with Tilly about (and that took not much guesswork) Father was making an effort to forget.
‘It seems, as we thought, my dear,’ Laurence nodded to Elizabeth, ‘that the cinema will run into a few problems.’
‘What?’ Isabel looked up belligerently, obviously prepared to take anything to do with the Swinford-Brownes personally.
‘Mr Thorn refuses to move, but Mrs Leggat, being a Mutter, is therefore only too happy to oblige. She claims that ever since her ale house was forced to close nine years ago, she’s been living with the smell of stale beer, and she cannot wait to leave.’
‘I think Mr Thorn’s a nuisance,’ declared Isabel. ‘It’s most generous of Mr Swinford-Browne.’
There was an awkward silence.
‘A good deed, if not from a good egg,’ George broke in.
‘A curate’s egg.’ Phoebe sniggered, till she saw Caroline’s eye on her.
‘Can’t the cinema be built somewhere else?’ Felicia contributed.
‘Mr Swinford-Browne has apparently decided upon a central village position. That is the only one available – owing to the pond, the village oak, ourselves, the churchyard and the general stores inconsiderately taking up his other choice positions. H
owever, where this cinema goes is immaterial. The more important issue is what it would mean for Ashden.’
‘It’ll be jolly exciting,’ George enthused.
The Rector looked grave. ‘For such excitement we have Tunbridge Wells and London. In Ashden we have a community that would be threatened by such an intrusion.’
‘We could visit it sometimes, couldn’t we, Father?’ Felicia asked eagerly.
‘I fear not.’
‘Whyever not?’ George was aghast.
‘Pictures are exciting,’ cried Phoebe, horrified. They would at least be something to look forward to in her visits back from finishing school. Besides darling Christopher, of course.
‘And informative,’ Caroline put in hopefully, but in vain.
‘I fear, Elizabeth,’ her father said, ‘our community seems already split.’
‘Between Mutters and Thorns,’ answered Isabael impatiently. ‘It always will be.’
‘Not that.’
‘Between chapel and church?’ Tilly asked.
‘No. Those rifts are surmountable, but this one is between the older generation and the new, and in that there can never be compromise.’
‘It’s nice here.’ Agnes looked primly around her in the crowded Pantiles teashop in Tunbridge Wells; she looked everywhere but at Jamie.
‘But you don’t like towns, do you?’
‘I’m a farm girl.’ She tried to joke.
‘You’re my girl,’ he replied quietly. ‘Aren’t you?’
Agnes swallowed as she felt tears pricking at the back of her eyes. To be sitting here with Jamie, hearing his laugh, and him so handsome, with his strong arms and that special twinkle just for her, and the prospect of being kissed on the way home, would have meant heaven only a week or two ago. Now everything had changed, and he was looking at her in appeal, reversing their roles and leaving her floundering.
She fastened her attention on the fairy cakes as though they could provide some sort of answer.
‘Aren’t you?’ he repeated.
‘Yes.’
‘Come on, Aggie, let’s get out of here. Let’s breathe.’ No one knew them here in the big town, not like Ashden where Agnes felt eyes following her everywhere she went now. She didn’t care whether they were looking at her in pity, or if they were laughing at her for being a fool, she hated it just the same. She told herself it was worse for Jamie. Seeing him so desperate changed things. She had been a princess with a handsome prince to look after her, but now she was only Agnes Pilbeam with a man she wasn’t sure she knew. They walked in silence up to the common where they could be alone.
‘You’re doubting me, aren’t you, Aggie?’ Jamie asked sadly at last. ‘Just because of that Ruth’s lies.’
‘It’s not that, Jamie –’ She turned to him, she couldn’t help it, and the prince put his arm in hers to show passers-by they were engaged, and everything was all right again. Then those insidious voices began again. Did he do this to her?
Jamie felt her stiffen and took his arm away. ‘If you don’t believe me, Agnes, who will? I might as well make away with myself.’
‘Have done, Jamie,’ she replied sharply. ‘No talk like that. It’s just I remember that evening – you wanted me to – well, like we were already married, and I wouldn’t. I wondered if you did it with her because you were cross with me for not – obliging.’
Jamie did not reply. Didn’t she realise how difficult it was to respect her like he should? When your head and your heart told you one thing, and the rest of your body was shouting something quite different. Why did he bother? His brother Len never did. He’d been boasting since he was thirteen about the girls he’d had. Disgusting, he’d thought it, until he grew up and found out what it was like.
‘You think what you like, Aggie. I thought as we were to be wed you might just about have trusted me, that’s all.’
She burst out crying. ‘I do, I do, Jamie.’
When there was nobody around, they kissed and made up, but there didn’t seem much to say on the train back home, so they didn’t say anything.
Laurence Lilley wondered curiously what this summons to Ashden Manor might be for. It was by no means unusual for Sir John to ask him for a discussion at the end of ‘Squire’s Day’. From Tuesdays to Fridays Sir John worked in London, on some army job he would never define, and Reggie ran the estate. On Mondays, Sir John had decided the Squire himself, not his heir, should be present, for the equivalent of the parson’s ‘Hour’, when parishioners as well as tenants of his estate might come to seek advice on anything that might be troubling them. Caroline and Eleanor were frequently called on to write letters as a result for the older, illiterate villagers, and occasionally to act as peacemakers over some trivial issue. The Rector dealt with matters of conscience, or with urgent issues that could not wait till Monday, and Sir John dealt with secular matters.
There was an urgency about today’s summons to the Manor that puzzled the Rector. Unlike his daughter, he went to the front entrance of Ashden Manor. Lady Hunney, or Maud as she was referred to privately between himself and Elizabeth, was not a figure of awe, but rather to be pitied. He had suffered too much at the hands of his own mother to fear any lesser mortals cast in the same mould. He wondered whether Sir John’s summons could be connected with the Ruth Horner affair, which was growing in intensity and urgency. How, if so, could he be involved?
The affair had, from Agnes’s point of view, taken a turn for the worse, for he had now spoken to Jamie. He liked the lad, and so the outcome of the talk had distressed him. He wasn’t, or so the Rector had thought, born in the same mould as his elder brother, Len, and he could have sworn he was well-intentioned. But even the best of intentions could be forgotten when the flesh took over. Laurence was not so old that he could not remember Elizabeth, the summer evenings, and the agonising wait before they were wed.
Jamie had denied it, of course, and stood up to him – at first. ‘Ruth is lying, sir. I never did see her.’
‘Her story is very convincing, Jamie. I’ve talked to her again and she has told me of your meetings in your grandfather’s cottage.’
‘What?’ The boy’s face had suddenly gone white.
He’d shut up like a clam, guilt written all over his face. The Rector had seen that look on too many faces to have any doubt at all. Guilt, caught by the unexpected. So how could Tilly’s ridiculous theory be true? He loved his sister, but they were chips off the same block and when they clashed it was Titan against Titan.
The butler showed him into the study where Sir John was waiting for him.
‘Thank you for coming, Mr Lilley.’ On rare occasions after port and a cigar Christian names would be used, but on occasions such as this formality was a strength, not a distancing factor. Their wives maintained the same formality, but with different reasons, and it was never relaxed despite their long and on the whole peaceable relationship.
The subject was not Jamie Thorn, for which the Rector was thankful, as he sat down in the chair to which the Squire had waved him. Sir John was a shorter man than Laurence, but their faces betrayed characters with much in common: men of firm opinions, and considered judgement. Where Sir John was often content to be silent, however, assessing situations as on a battlefield, the Rector usually pressed forward, using dry humour as a cover to talk his way to the truth. There was kindness in both men, but little humour in Sir John. Moreover, the one considered an incorrectly folded newspaper a sign of disintegrating society; the other could see little relevance between private preferences and public heart.
‘Thomas Cooper visited me about his cottage.’ Sir John did not believe in lengthy preambles. ‘Mr Swinford-Browne has asked him to move into an almshouse. He has refused.’
‘The former oast-house worker on the Towers’ estate? But he’s retired.’
‘Precisely. It’s a tied cottage, because he used to work for the hop farm. After his son moved out last year, there’s no legal reason Swinford-Browne should continue letting it t
o old Tom. As I gather Swinford-Browne pointed out, it was decent of him to find him room in the almshouses.’
‘Church almshouses.’ The Rector rubbed the side of his nose absently. ‘But there is a vacancy, so no matter.’
‘No matter? My dear Mr Lilley, take care. You and Swinford-Browne are shortly to be linked by marriage.’
Sir John was the politician, he the moralist. Of course, Laurence realised belatedly, anything linking Swinford-Browne to the Rectory would be scrutinised by the village for signs of favouritism. ‘I could not at the moment see grounds for not granting an almshouse to Cooper, when there is one available. Mrs Hastings died last month.’
‘I understand, though I gather Sammy Farthing has his eye on it, but the point of my concern is that Cooper does not want to move.’
‘He worked the hop fields and oast-houses for fifty years. It would be a hard man that turned him out for his last ten or so. He must be seventy.’
‘Unfortunately that does not count in law.’
‘His son was dismissed to make way for Mr Eliot, the new manager.’ Laurence thought for a moment. ‘I cannot believe Swinford-Browne wishes that small cottage for Eliot. He has some plan.’
The Squire eyed him appreciatively. ‘I’ll make a politician of you yet, Mr Lilley. He wishes, I gather, though I have no proof, to move Mrs Leggatt into the cottage – and she is not eligible for an almshouse yet.’
‘Of course. The cinema. He needs to buy her cottage. I gather, however, Ebenezer Thorn is refusing to sell his cottage, so Swinford-Browne’s efforts may be in vain.’
‘He is not a man to give up so easily. I have advised Cooper to go to my lawyer, but I fear he stands little chance, unless there is something in the deeds about the cottage being used only for farm purposes, and even then Cooper himself has no claim.’
‘And what is my role?’
Sir John trod carefully. ‘My instinct tells me there are murky waters round this episode and, as the stick that stirs them is shortly to be linked to your family, I wished you to be warned, since there is also the question of the new cemetery. Do we have no rights over Tallow Field? It is glebe land.’