The Hawthorne Heritage

by The Hawthorne Heritage (retail) (epub)

  Twice a week she visited her mother. Maria was in pain and had not regained the use of her legs, although through what seemed to Jessica sheer force of will she could move her hands a little more freely. She refused, adamantly and with all her old authority, to be moved into Old Hall. ‘What can you be thinking of, Jessica my dear? You surely know me better than to believe I could live in a house full of females, much as I love you all? And in any case – you have quite enough on your plate with Sarah – I should be hopeless with the poor old thing – you know how impatient I am. You’d be living in a houseful of old women! Horrid thought! No, no – I’m quite comfortable here, thank you.’

  ‘Perhaps next winter?’ Jessica suggested. ‘After the building work is finished and the Hall is cosy again? I could have a separate suite of rooms made for you at the east end of the house – nobody would bother you—’

  Maria laughed. ‘How very persistent you are! You get that from me, you know. But no, Jessica, I shan’t be needing your rooms in the east wing.’ She caught her daughter’s suddenly sharp look and held her eyes with her own untroubled gaze. Jessica frowned a little and opened her mouth to speak. Her mother, with difficulty, lifted an imperious, knotted finger. ‘Enough, Jessica. Don’t fuss, now. You know I can’t abide fuss—’

  That day, trying not to worry about the clear inference of her mother’s words she rode back via Home Farm. It was two weeks before Christmas, and bitterly cold. The sky was leaden and miserable, and the wind that bit viciously at her face as she rode blew down from the north. She found Charlie loading a supply of cleaned and cut turnips into a farm cart to take down to the sheep pens. Bess lay not far from him, her nose on her paws, jealously watching his every move.

  He staightened easily, smiling. ‘Afternoon.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Charlie. I thought I’d drop in to see if the ewe with the sore udder is improved?’

  He leaned for a moment on the cart’s tail, brushing his forehead with his coat sleeve despite the cold. The great Suffolk Punch stood docile as a lamb between the shafts of the cart. ‘Aye. She’s fine. The treatment worked well.’

  The mare danced a little, and in the movement Jessica caught sight of Charlie’s tall double-barrelled shotgun leaning against the driving seat of the cart. She frowned a little. ‘Why the gun? You don’t usually carry it with you, do you?’

  He shook his head a little grimly. ‘There’s a dog about. Great brute of a thing. Wild, I think. It’s bin after the sheep.’

  ‘Worrying them?’

  He nodded. ‘But don’t worry. I’ll have the bugger before long—’ He lifted his head and smiled suddenly, his teeth shining very white in his weather-burned face. ‘Beggin’ your pardon, Ma’am.’ The apology was mischievous.

  She laughed a little. He pushed himself away from the tailgate. ‘Would you be wanting to pick up some more of that horse liniment while you’re here? I mixed it last night. Tha’ss ready if you’d like it.’

  ‘Yes, I will. Thank you. It’s by far the best we’ve tried. Ben was saying just the other day that it worked wonders on Bay Dancer’s bad leg.’ She kicked her foot free of the stirrup and made to swing down from the little mare. She rarely used the sidesaddle when she rode alone around the estate. The mare moved a little and Charlie stepped forward to hold her head. The great carthorse made to follow him and the huge iron wheels grated noisily on the cobbled yard. The mare, startled, reared and danced away before Charlie could reach her and Jessica, caught by surprise, was flung from the saddle to land with a bruising thump on her left shoulder.

  With a sharp exclamation Charlie dropped to his knee beside her. She struggled dazedly to a sitting position, her right hand clasping her painful shoulder. She tried to laugh, succeeded in only producing a slightly shaky squeak. ‘Good Lord! I haven’t fallen off a horse since I was eight years old!’

  ‘Don’t stand up. Wait a bit. Let me have a look at you.’ Charlie had an arm about her, supporting her. With the other hand he slipped the jacket from her shoulder. She let out a smothered gasp of pain. ‘Gently, now, gently.’ His voice was softly calming. With deft, probing fingers he explored the damaged shoulder. She had seen him many times handle an injured animal so, gently, firmly, reassuringly. His fingers probed, and she jumped. ‘Ah,’ he said, and then, a few moments later. ‘Tha’ss all right. That’ll be bruised an’ painful, but tha’ss not broken. Can you get your jacket back on?’

  She nodded, and with his help got to her feet and struggled into her jacket. She had banged her knee as well, and it throbbed painfully.

  He put a hand firmly under her elbow. ‘Come over to the house and rest a while,’ he said. ‘Tha’ss shaken you up.’

  To Jessica’s surprise as they approached the door of the house it opened, a girl stood there regarding Jessica with wide, anxious blue eyes. She was painfully thin and frail as a buttercup, a mop of bright yellow hair pushed untidily beneath her small mob cap. Though obviously no child she looked like an undernourished waif, the bones of her shoulderblades showing clearly beneath the shabby homespun of her dress, and there were unhealthy shadows beneath her eyes. Behind her, the room had been transformed. The windows shone, framed by clean and pretty curtains, the range was alight, the small door open to let the cheer of the fire into the room. A pot from which rose an appetizing steam bubbled on the hob. On the table stood a small glass jar in which some evergreen twigs, fir, ivy and holly with its bright berries, had been prettily arranged.

  ‘Minna – get Her Ladyship a chair. Hurry.’

  Jessica disentangled her arm. ‘No – really – I’m all right. Just a bit stiff, that’s all.’

  ‘That’ll be more than stiff tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll try some of your liniment on it.’ She had regained the composure that the unexpected appearance of the girl had so strangely disturbed, and her voice was light, though she flinched as she moved and a stab of pain shot through her shoulder. She studied the room, watched the waif-like girl with her promise of beauty.

  The girl half-carried, half-dragged the only chair to where Jessica stood. Jessica seated herself, straight-backed, finding that she had to force her smile. ‘Hello. I haven’t seen you before, have I?’

  ‘Her name’s Minna. Minna Newton,’ Charlie said. ‘She’s from the village. She comes up to do for me a couple of times a week. Her brother Peter helps with the sheep.’

  And she doesn’t have a tongue of her own, Jessica thought, mildly caustic, as the girl stood with downcast eyes, her hands twisting in front of her, half-hidden by her apron.

  ‘I’ll get the liniment,’ Charlie said. ‘Minna – mull some ale. Her Ladyship needs something to warm her.’

  With little, nervous movements the girl drew the ale from the small cask that stood in the corner, set the jug upon the range, thrust the poker into the fire to heat. She kept her face turned from Jessica and her bony shoulders were hunched defensively almost to her ears. Her thin hands shook a little.

  ‘You’ve made the room very pretty,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Thank you Ma’am – Y’re Ladyship—’ It was the barest whisper.

  ‘You come twice a week?’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am. Mondays an’ Thursdays. An’ Sat’days I help with the sheep with Petie.’

  ‘I see.’

  The poker was hot. The girl took it from the fire and plunged it into the ale jug. The liquid seethed and sizzled. The girl looked around for mugs.

  ‘They’re in the cupboard in the corner,’ Jessica said, and was surprised at the obscure satisfaction it gave.

  Silent and downcast Minna took two mugs from the cupboard and poured the ale as Charlie came back into the room. Bess, following him, padded with swishing tail across the room and lifted her nose to Minna, who patted the little bitch, her gaunt face softening. Jessica felt a sudden and absolutely absurd frisson of something very close to jealousy. In all the times she had known Charlie Bess had never come near her, let alone shown affection.

  Minna, hol
ding the mug carefully between two hands, brought her the drink. Jessica accepted it with murmured thanks. Her shoulder was hurting and so was her knee. She could feel her back stiffening a little. She felt quite ridiculously sorry for herself.

  The ale was good, strong and hot. She drank in silence, watched as Charlie took the other mug, with no thanks, from Minna. Neither did he offer that the girl should share it. Minna turned back to the range, busied herself with her back to them. Bess lay close to her feet.

  Charlie looked at Jessica. ‘How’s the shoulder feelin’?’

  ‘Painful.’

  ‘Aye. That will be. For a coupl’a days or more. Rest’s the best thing. Try not to use it.’

  She nodded, finished the ale and stood up, supporting herself by the back of the chair, waving away his offer of help with an unconsciously arrogant gesture that brought him up short. ‘I’d better get back,’ she said, ‘before I stiffen up and can’t ride.’

  He was reaching for his stick. ‘I’ll walk with you.’

  ‘No. Thank you. That won’t be necessary. I’m perfectly all right.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No, Charlie. I tell you there’s no need.’ Her voice was sharp, and cool. She turned from him and left the room, facing the wind of the dark afternoon, a strange tide of ill-temper rising within her. She did not give the girl a word or a glance of farewell.

  Quietly Charlie followed her. Perforce she had to allow him to help her to mount, for her shoulder was too painful to manage alone. Once in the saddle she jerked on the reins, taking them from his hands. He stepped back, unsmiling. His face was forbidding.

  Infuriatingly, for she certainly had had no intention of mentioning the girl, she found herself saying, ‘I didn’t know you had someone to help you in the house?’

  He shrugged. ‘She needed the work. Her father and elder brother bin laid off from New Hall. The mother’s poorly. The few shillings I pay the two sprats come in handy. The family’d be in the workhouse without.’

  ‘Why were the father and brother laid off?’

  He clearly hesitated for a moment. Then he lifted his head, his eyes direct. ‘Seems Mr Giles thinks they’ve bin causing trouble.’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘They were tryin’ to organize the labour.’

  ‘Organize—? You mean – unionize? On New Hall land?’

  Charlie shrugged a little.

  ‘I’m not surprised Giles sacked them. It would be a red rag to a bull!’

  ‘They were only tryin’ to do what they thought was right,’ he said, very quiet and mild.

  Somewhere in the near distance a dog barked. Charlie turned his head, immediately alert. Jessica too lifted her head, listening, but heard nothing more above the bluster of the wind in the trees. ‘Was that the wild dog?’

  He was still listening intently. ‘Could be. Damn’ it for a killer. I’d better get down to the pens. You sure you can manage alone?’

  ‘I can manage.’

  He handed up the bottle of liniment he was carrying, and she saw the faint glimmer of his teeth in his dark face. ‘You could do worse than to try that, Y’re Ladyship,’ the title was faintly mocking. ‘Though you’ll stink to high heaven. Tha’ss got no lady’s perfume in it!’

  She took the bottle, returning his smile. ‘I might at that.’ She turned the mare and walked her down the track into the wind. Behind her she heard his chirrup to the great, patient carthorse and the grinding of the wheels as the ungainly cart turned in the small yard.

  It was some hours later, fussed and bathed and tucked into bed by an exasperatedly solicitous Angelina, before she allowed herself to examine the events of the afternoon and to recognize in honesty that the immediate antagonism she had felt for poor, defenceless little Minna had been something absurdly close to jealousy. Not so much of her, as of the change she had obviously wrought in Charlie’s life. At least until now if she, Jessica, had been alone then Charlie had been even more so. The austere and cold little house in which he lived had been eloquent testament to that. But this afternoon the warm room, the appetizing smell that had filled the little house, the small pot of evergreens so lovingly arranged upon the table had made a scene so homely that for a moment she had felt a stranger, an unwanted outsider intruding on another woman’s territory, and she had resented that. And what was more she was sure that the girl, for all the downcast eyes and still tongue, had returned her resentment in full. She knew she had not imagined the look in the shadowed blue eyes as they had rested on Charlie – any more than she had imagined Bess’ immediate and unquestioning acceptance of the small intruder’s presence. As she lay, drowsy from the medicine that kindly, fussing Angelina had administered yet still uncomfortable from the pain in her bruised shoulder, she found herself wondering what other services the girl provided for Charlie. Did they do together the things that she and Danny had done? Did he love her with his powerful body, did she cry out in the darkness of that little cottage as his great strength was spent in her? She moved restlessly. No! Surely not! Charlie wouldn’t find that pale little shadow of a child attractive! She could not believe it! Charlie was a man, with a man’s pride, a man’s strength, a man’s lust. Such milk and water wouldn’t – couldn’t! – be to his taste?

  The fire that Angelina had built for her flared and glowed, making the room uncomfortably hot. She pushed the bedclothes back, wincing at the twinge in her shoulder, unbuttoned her heavy nightgown to let the cooler air brush her throat and breasts. Shadows danced upon the tester of the bed, flickered in the dark corners of the room. When she slept it was to dreams that were to shame her when she woke, stiff and sore, in the morning.

  * * *

  The weather worsened. Bad before Christmas it got even wilder in the New Year, with no sign of let-up, no mild spell to break the relentless battering of wind and rain. Oddly, though it was bitterly cold it did not snow. The wind cut like a knife, the sky was heavy and the rain drove in constant drenching gusts across the countryside. The river rose, swollen and yellow, sullen-looking as it sucked at the soft banks and tugged at the exposed roots of the trees. The mud was a squelching trap for foot and hoof, and a sheep once fallen could not get to her feet for the weight of rain in her fleece. The ewes, Charlie reckoned, were about six weeks off lambing: and the depredations of the wild dog were getting worse. In the middle of January they lost a valuable crossbred ewe to the animal. Two weeks later young Peter surprised the beast amongst the flock and drove it off, but a ewe aborted and valuable twin lambs were lost. Charlie was in a cold rage.

  ‘I’ll kill the bugger with my bare hands! See if I don’t!’

  ‘Did Peter see what it looks like?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘We’ve both seen it. Tha’ss like a bloody wolf – prick-eared, bushy tailed, mangy, grey. And fast as the devil.’

  ‘Where does it live?’

  ‘Tha’ss what no one knows. Moves about like a shadow. One minute tha’ss here, the next tha’ss over to Melford, or raidin’ at Links Farm.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope that someone stops it soon. With lambing coming up in a few weeks we don’t need a killer dog to contend with—’

  Charlie’s finger closed over the worn stock of his gun, and he stared grimly into the driving rain. ‘Tha’ss not “someone” as is goin’ to get it. Tha’ss me. That dog’s mine, an’ I’ll get it if it kills me.’

  ‘Would it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Would it attack a human?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who knows? But if the weather gets worse an’ the livin’ out there gets harder I wouldn’t let a child o’ mine out in these woods alone.’

  The bad weather made life hard at Old Hall. The roof sprang a new leak a day, or so it seemed to the exasperated Jessica. Wood rotted, water crept under doors and through ill-fitting window frames. The wind battered relentlessly at none-too-sound leaded windows and weakened brickwork. But January did eventually end, and February came, and that meant that the sale, and the money, we
re closer. And surely – the weather could not stay like this for ever?

  Sarah took cold, out looking for the dead Sir Thomas in the rain, and was very poorly for a while, and Gabriella, nurtured in the Italian sun, seemed permanently to be sniffling and led poor Jane Barton, whose catarrh reddened her nose and puffed her eyes, a dance that brought her mother’s exasperated wrath upon her head more than once.

  The days crept coldly on: two weeks to the start of lambing, six weeks to the sale. Painstakingly Jessica had, at her mother’s dictation, written yet another letter to the moneylender asking for another couple of months’ grace to pay Patrick’s debt. Over the winter the 1,000 guineas had become 1,050. In the cold church, sheltering from the rain on the way to put holly and greenstuff on Patrick’s grave Jessica suggested forcibly to St Agatha that a good price for Theo’s book was now essential – or it was not just the church that would be in danger of falling down.

  And then, in February, the change in the weather came at last – but it was too much in such a year to expect that it might be a change for the better.

  Jessica woke to darkness and to silence, the only sound the murmuring lap of the risen river. For a moment she could not identify the change, and then it registered. There was no sound of wind, no driving rain. It was as if an enormous dark silence gripped the world, bitingly cold. As dawn broke, reluctant and grey, the atmosphere grew if anything colder. Everything was frozen – the mud into irritating, corrugated, ankle-breaking ridges of brown rock, the puddles into dangerous sheets of slippery glass. As the day wore on the river edges began to clog with ice, and the trees were black with it. The sky hung in dark and heavy billows above the miserable, frozen world. In the afternoon, almost as if by sheer habit, the rain tried to fall but turned immediately to sleet that rattled the windows and bounced onto the hard ground where it lay like a layer of dirty broken beads. With night, it was a relief to draw the curtains and stoke up the fires. In the next couple of days the cold did not abate. And then, on the day that Jessica, tired of being cooped up in the dark and airless house, decided to ride to Tollgate House to see if all was well with her mother, the snow came at last.