by Joan Smith
It seemed a small, mean and crabbed little cottage after the grace and spaciousness of Fern Bank. But then next to the boardinghouse, it was a mansion. In actual fact it was a decent whitewashed house two stories high, with eight habitable rooms. There was a parlor done in oak paneling, rather like my little sewing room at home. But comparisons are pointless. It was a roof over our heads—that was the important thing.
The church sits at the east edge of town, the rectory about two dozen steps away from it, toward Salford. On the other side of the church stands the bell tower. The bells have not been played within my memory, but Miss Aldridge thought a few of the old men might still know the method. The church itself was not pretty. Interesting architecturally is the strongest praise overheard in its honor. It is rather low and dark, dating from a very early age. The nave, folks say, is from the fourteenth century, the huge baptismal font at the front fifteenth, the pulpit (dark, oaken and very high), late sixteenth. A hundred or so years later the horsebox pews (the cause for the high pulpit) had been replaced by more modern boxes. There was a strange set of carved stairs at the back of the church that went halfway up to the ceiling, then stopped, leading nowhere at all. Andrew thought they were rood stairs, leading in days gone by to the rood loft, demolished by Edward VI.
The most modern item in the church is a sumptuous organ in the gallery, which has not been there but three years. It is a gift from Lord Aiken, an earl who has a summer home nearby. They do say he collected it in payment of a gambling debt and had nowhere else to put it. Inasmuch as there is not a single person in the parish who can play it, and as a gift it was particularly inappropriate, one is inclined to believe this story.
Andrew amused himself with this expensive toy while I set to the chore of bringing our house to order. It had stood vacant for more than ten years, which will give you some idea of the gargantuan task before me. My hands, white as a lily, became red and roughened from the strong soaps required to clean the place up. When Dame Aldridge noticed this, she sent me over a couple of girls to help. I scrimped on household finances to buy a few bits of bright curtain material, while I regretted we had not had the foresight to bring some of our own furnishings from Fern Bank to make us look respectable.
We settled into our new home, becoming familiar with all its nooks and crannies, its drafty windows and creaking doors. We discovered there was an old crypt beneath the church, a thing I had never known before. While investigating the grounds behind for the possibility of growing a vegetable garden, I espied an old slanted door. Curious to see where it led, I tried all the keys till I found the one that fit it. Later I also discovered a door to it from the vestry, hidden under the parish chest.
We had taken the giant step of getting a roof over our heads, but there was very little money to live on, only the pittance paid to Andrew as overseer of the poor. It was my turn to pitch in and raise a wage. There was an old piano in the place. I gave lessons to some of the local girls, but it provided only a mite. Many's the night we went with only bread and cheese for dinner, too proud to beg and too accustomed to better fare to be satisfied. Folks visited us, trying to be sociable, but giving them even tea and cake was a strain on our budget. It got so that I dreaded to hear the door knocker sound. Five times out of ten it would be Mrs. Everett too, complaining about some new fault she had unearthed at Fern Bank, and never offering us a basket of vegetables or fruit or a thing, though she knew very well we were needy.
I asked her quite pointedly on one visit what she was doing with all the fruit from the succession houses. “When my father was alive, we used to distribute many baskets to the poor,” I told her.
"Succession houses? I don't know how your poor father ever contrived to grow a thing. Jerome says they will have to be rebuilt before they can be used. He has an architect coming in to see what can be done with them. We have let those puny orange trees and pineapples wilt away and will set up a proper orangery one of these days."
As summer turned to fall, I began taking in a little embroidery, claiming I did it for amusement. It paid for fuel, but still it was clearly not enough to live on. I needed a regular job.
The squire never came next or nigh us. On Friday Andrew took the gig up to Holy Hell to deliver the squire sermons he could scarcely pronounce, and on Sunday they both remained after church juggling the books and discussing church business—i.e., Andrew told him what parishioners stood in want of christening, marrying or burying.
I said “How do you do?” in arctic accent when I met him in the town. He lifted his hat and nodded, without smiling. His pride had been dealt a blow, and I had some misgivings the situation between us would not remain forever so peaceful. In short, he was plotting a revenge, but what form it might take was impossible to tell.
Chapter Two
When my aunt, Mrs. Harvey, finally perceived an inkling of our circumstances, she was at pains to help us. We declined an offer to go to her, only to receive within a month another offer too interesting to disregard. There was a parish living opening in her neighborhood paying three hundred per annum, along with a very nice cottage and a kitchen garden. She would finance the matter of Andrew's taking holy orders. It would be madness not to take it. My brother went to inform Porson of our plans, and came home with a new notion. The squarson had offered him substantially the same deal. Andrew would take holy orders and take over this parish, where he was already doing more of the church work than Porson.
I wondered whether I was instrumental in this plan to keep us here. I was being leered at again in a certain way, which made me suspect he wanted Andrew out of the rectory so that I would be alone and undefended. If that was his scheme, he was thwarted. My ex-governess, Miss Edna Halka, was residing in the boardinghouse inhabited by Miss Plum and others. She was between positions, and agreed to accompany me till Andrew returned.
Miss Halka had not been happy at the boardinghouse. She told me tales of bad food and unaired beds that made me thank heaven I had avoided it. I soon formed the intention that Miss Halka would become a permanent part of our household. That is odd too, for we had not been bosom bows or anything of the sort when she was my governess. She had used to nag and pinch at me; she no longer did so. I discovered that she made a better friend than she had a teacher. I daresay it was our reversal of roles that made us both more comfortable. She was not born to boss, nor I to take orders. Edna—she asked me to call her Edna—was not physically attractive. Tall and thin, with brown hair turning to gray at the temples, though she was not much above forty. She seemed eager to get into old age.
Miss Aldridge often came to call. As the fall school term rolled around, she offered me a post at her dame school. She was beset with aches in her joints, and would welcome the luxury of being able to stay at home on a wet or windy day. The rowdier boys had taken advantage of her creeping infirmity to get quite out of hand. There is no point being polite to wretches who bring a badger into the classroom to frighten you, or who keep frogs and mice in their pockets. I instituted a rigorous regime of keeping them in after school when they pulled these stunts on me.
It was my being still there at four-thirty one afternoon that first introduced me to my life of crime. I had just released Tommie Jenkins and Bill Marson (the worst of a bad lot) and was locking up the doors. This was in late autumn. They were not much needed at home or I would not have kept them in.
Glancing out the window to gauge how long I had to get home before the rain came down, for of course we get a great deal of rain on the coast, I chanced to see two young fellows fleeing down the road at a great rate, peering over their shoulders in fright. I tapped at the window to get their attention, and noticed it was the Hessler brothers, which told me the pursuer would be the revenue officer, Crites. He is no favorite in our community, Crites.
The boys (they were about sixteen and fifteen) saw me and fled to the school. You would need a heart of forged steel not to like the Hesslers, despite their many pranks. They are about the most common sight in the dis
trict, their black heads bouncing along the road together, always with a smile for everyone, while their dog—a beautiful collie named Lady—tags at their heels, sniffing at whatever bit of meat or fish they have poached and have slung over their backs in a bag. No, it is not quite fair to use the word “poached,” though I haven't a doubt they are into that business as well as their legitimate ones. Jemmie, the elder though he is the smaller, is our local higgler. He is often to be seen in his little red cart pulled by a mule, traveling around to all the farms peddling such urban wares as lace, ribbon, pots and brooms in exchange for any little oversupply of vegetable or fowl that the farmers do not consider worth a trip to market.
This is a meager job to provide for a widowed mother and three sisters. It is eked out by the trades of mole catcher, fisherman, warrener, fabricator of snares, traps, fishing rods and flies—anything to turn an honest penny. Young Mark is the junior partner in all these enterprises. I expect he is also Jemmie's partner in the smuggling trade. Their being chased by Crites certainly looked like it. I had some suspicion Jemmie was involved, but was a little surprised to see Mark, not a day over fifteen, had so early entered the profession.
I opened the door and let them in, before Crites should round the bend and see where they had gone. “He's a-coming, miss. Will you hide us?” Jemmie asked.
Indeed he was coming, cantering along on his old gray mare. I waved at him and called, “What's amiss, officer? Are you after smugglers?” with a wink over my shoulder at the lads.
"Two of them, Miss Anderson. Have you seen a sign of them?” he hollered back.
"Two rough-looking fellows just passed by the window a minute ago. They were headed toward the sheepwalk. If you hasten, you'll catch them."
"Thankee kindly,” he said, with a tip of his hat, and turned his mount in behind the school to the path where the sheep are taken to the hills, which our foolish geography book describes as the East Anglia Heights, though they are no more than gentle slopes. He would think he had turned the wrong way once he hit the sheepwalk and didn't find them. The sheepwalk is a meandering path that runs more or less parallel to the main road by the sea, half a mile or so behind it.
I closed the door and turned to my two petty criminals. “Well now, Jemmie and Mark, I hope you're proud of yourselves,” I said severely. “I'm sure your mother would be mightily pleased to hear you were being chased by Crites."
Mark pulled his forelock and blushed, but Jemmie smiled in a cagey way. “It's yourself we're proud of, miss. I didn't know the gentlemen had a friend in Miss Anderson.” The word “gentlemen” has no connotation of refinement here on the coast. It is a euphemism for smuggler, lest you are unaware of the term. It was natural they think the magistrate's daughter harbor no love for them, but to tell the truth, Papa liked his nip of brandy as well as anyone, and was never harsh with them when they came before him. There was never a day when there was not a barrel of the best in our cellar at Fern Bank. And half a dozen barrels still there to scandalize Mrs. Everett! I wondered she had not been to chide me for it.
"Only a friend in need, boys. I don't approve of your shenanigans,” I scolded, in my best schoolteacher's voice.
"Aye, but a friend in need is a friend indeed, miss, as the old saying goes,” Jemmie replied. “We'll not be forgetting your kindness. He nearly caught us hauling a barrel out of the ditch. We had to let him chase us, or he'd have got to routing around and found it."
"You'd best slip away fast before Crites is back,” I told them. They scampered out the door, back down the road to retrieve the barrel, while Crites plodded along the sheepwalk. I thought very little about it. Smuggling is a crime according to the laws of the land, of course, but here at Salford it is the largest employer, and has gained a certain respectability, as any well-paying employer will do. Work was scarce, and if a husband was to have bread and meat on his table to feed the family, he resorted to smuggling.
Little real harm was done by it, in my eyes at least. People were taxed to death, and what was done with the money but pay off the debts of that expensive raft of royal dukes and their mistresses? We were generous in the extreme with our war heroes too. Wellington set up for life, but what of his “scum of the earth” soldiers, as he was kind enough to describe the men who saved England from Napoleon's heel. They came home, mutilated, to grub for a bare existence, if they came home at all.
No, no, there is no question in my view. Smuggling is an honorable profession. Call me an anarchist if you like, but I maintain I am a Christian anarchist, and would rather be that than a heathen royalist. I always had a sneaking admiration for the gentlemen. Andrew and I used to play at it when we were children. Hidden in the middle of our spinney at Fern Bank there is a tumbledown shack called the poachers’ shack. No doubt it was well named, but in our games, it was where the gentlemen (me) hid the brandy, and the revenue officer (Andrew) got his comeuppance.
I enjoyed the game, and can well imagine the real thing must be thrilling. What a break in the dull life of a laborer, to slip over to France on a moonless night, or hide in readiness at home to receive the countraband. Had I been a man, I would certainly have joined them. But I was only a woman, so I winked at their activities and lent a hand when I could.
Then too, Officer Crites was not at all popular. The man he replaced, Officer Daggar, had been much better liked, due to his willingness to take a bribe upon occasion. Crites was a martinet. He'd have turned in his own mother. In fact, he did turn in his fiancée's brother, which lost him a fiancée and made him a host of enemies.
My infraction of the law did not trouble my conscience unduly, though of course I knew abetting the gentlemen was a crime. I would have forgotten it by the next day if it had not been for the reward my new friends chose to bestow on me. Next morning as I went out to school, there was a shiny golden guinea sitting on the doorstep. We had had no callers the night before. No one but myself had been through that door since late yesterday afternoon. It was a payment for services rendered. Helping them caused not a twinge, but taking money for it did. I determined to purchase new books for the school with it, and did so.
Two weeks passed, bringing us to the cold, rainy, windy, disagreeable month of November. As it was a Friday and I looked forward to getting an early start on my weekend, I kept no one in that night. The animal sessions at school were well under control. Miss Aldridge had a wicked cold, and I had taken the school alone that whole week, which made the weekend loom with more pleasure even than usual, since I did not exactly like teaching for a living. There was a timid tap at the door as I put on my pelisse. I went to answer it, thinking some student had forgotten his lunch basket or books.
There stood Jemmie Hessler with his cap in his hands and a very worried frown on his youthful face. Lady sniffed and yelped at a brown bag that was slung over his shoulder. “G'day, miss,” he said, shuffling his feet. I peered down the road, but he was not followed. “Could I come in for a minute?” he asked.
We went in and sat at two little desks that buckled both of our knees, making me realize the taller of my students must spend acutely uncomfortable hours here, for I was not tall myself, and Jemmie was a small, compact, wiry fellow about my own height. “What is it, Jem?” I urged him on, curious but still eager to be home.
"It's the stuff, miss,” he said. “Crites has tumbled to it we're keeping it at the warehouse behind the lumber, and there's a load in tonight. We've nought to do with it till it goes out Sunday night. We've got a tranter coming to carry it south Sunday night, but there's two days for Crites to sniff around and find it."
"How about the stable loft at the inn?” I asked. During Daggar's entire reign the stable loft at the inn had been used. It had been no secret you could go there any hour of the day or night with your bottle and buy any amount you wanted.
"That's the second place he'll look."
"Are there no haystacks or potato graves you can use?"
"He's on to all the old regular stunts, miss, the fuelhouses an
d chimmers, ricks and rainwater butts. We don't want to divide the load up, for the tranter won't make a dozen stops nowadays, with Crites prowling like a ghost."
I looked at him, bewildered. “But what is it you want me to do, Jem?"
He swallowed twice and blurted it out. “We was wondering if you'd let us keep it here."
I stared as though he were an apparition from Hades. “Here, at the school you mean? No, no, I couldn't consider it. It is too dangerous."
"It's not dangerous at all. It's the last place in the world he'd look."
"Oh, but if he should look!"
"With the cold winter coming on, and warm clothes to be bought and all, it seems a pity...” He said no more, but looked at me with the eyes of a starving puppy. Lady, sitting at his feet, cast a similar glance at me, gently accusing.
"It smells. The children would notice it at once on Monday morning,” I said brusquely. But I thought of my schoolchildren, walking home in their threadbare garments, with that winter wind getting colder by the day.
"The smell's no stranger to most of ‘em. They'd never notice it."
"No, I don't like this. Let me think.” I suggested a couple of other spots, all of which were vetoed for one reason or another. “If I were ever caught, I'd lose my job."
"You'll not get caught, miss,” he promised cockily.
"I have the only key, except Miss Aldridge's. If you are seen with it, it will be known where you got it."
"Nay, miss. It'll only be known you dropped your key, and the wicked gentlemen picked it up and used it. We'd never be incriminating you, and you've the word of the gentlemen on that."
"No,” I said, making up my mind hastily. “I'll not give you the key, but I sometimes forget to close the back window in the teacher's pantry. And mind you leave it open as well to get rid of the stench by Monday morning."
He grabbed my hand, then released it hastily with a beet-like blush, while Lady barked her approval. “You're a right one, miss,” he said, beaming broadly.