‘Because you’re not a mill girl, Miss Tessa, that’s why.’ Emma rounded on her, goaded beyond endurance, her face a bright pink in her effort to restrain herself from smacking this silly child’s face.
‘Mother was once and she’s allowed to wear her hair anyway she likes and I don’t see why I shouldn’t. All this dressing up . . .’
The perilous sound of her voice was interrupted by the resonant noise of the dinner gong from the hallway downstairs and the relief etched on Emma’s face was quite comical. Thank God, oh, thank God, she repeated over and over again to herself as Miss Tessa sighed in heartbroken resignation, or so she would have her maid believe, and began to move dejectedly towards the bed and the inevitability of the pretty gown which lay there. She’d put her in the damn dress without her stays, for where was Polly? And do her hair in a simple coil on her neck. Make her presentable for a family dinner. But if she brought up this ridiculous notion of cutting her hair again Emma would go right to Mrs Harrison and ask to be relieved of her duties, really she would. The privilege of being a ladies’ maid was not worth it, not to this one, it wasn’t, and if it came to it she’d rather scrub the bloody scullery floors than go through what she suffered day after day with Miss Tessa, really she would.
The foal was on its feet, its shy, liquid eyes, fringed with deep brown lashes, looking anxiously at the entranced group of humans who hung over the stable door. The mare was inclined to be despotic in her protection, tossing her head challengingly and Tessa laughed with delight.
‘Is she not brave? I do believe if one of us was to go in there she’d kick and bite until we took ourselves out again. And what a little beauty her baby is! Look at those legs and the colour of her. She’s like the mahogany table in the hall. Honestly, I could cry when I think we might have been here to see her born had we not been made to eat dinner at the prescribed time that every one else in the valley dines. Would you not think that just for once we might have been allowed to absent ourselves so that we could have seen her born? Percy could have come for us . . . Oh, look at her, will you? She is going to – what is the word, Walter? – suckle. There is no need to blush . . . and see how she goes at it. Even with those fragile legs she can stand to do it. What was the exact time of her birth, Walter?’
She turned to the stable lad who leaned with them over the loose-box door, the expression on his face as foolishly doting as a mother with her firstborn, his head to one side, shoulder to shoulder with the Greenwoods, social position forgotten in the wonder of the shared moment.
‘T’were just gone eight, I reckon, Miss Tessa.’
‘There, you see, we were half-way through the soup.’ Her expression was dramatic.
‘Well, we were here for almost an hour before dinner, but you didn’t show up.’ Drew’s voice was scornful. ‘I suppose you were preening yourself in that delectable creation you have on and had not the time for something of real interest. Your own reflection in the mirror must have been altogether fascinating . . .’
‘That’s not true, damn you.’ Tessa’s face had turned a furious red and her raised voice caused the new mother to stamp her feet in anger and alarm.
‘Keep your bloody voice down, cousin. If you make her nervous she’ll lose her milk. And it doesn’t really matter to anyone whether you came or not since we all missed the big event.’
‘I tried to come, I really did. It was all the fault of Emma and her absolute refusal to allow me to cut my hair.’
‘Your hair, Miss Tessa?’ The stable lad was clearly mystified.
‘Oh, take no notice, Walter.’ Pearce’s eyes were narrowed in admiring contemplation of the mare and her foal, and not a little envious of Drew to whom they both belonged. He had won the animal in a bet, a wager with Nicky Longworth. Drew had declared his bay to be capable of jumping higher than Nick’s magnificent roan and since the bet had been Drew’s bay against Nick’s mare which had been in foal, they had set up the practice fence in the Longworth paddock immediately. The great deal of money his father had paid for his bay did not even cross Drew’s mind and if it had there was little doubt he would not have allowed himself to be concerned over it. Nor did he consider that if he lost he would be without a decent mount. He would win, whatever the cost, to himself or his animal. A wager was a wager and a gentleman would honour it, as he would any challenge.
‘How high shall it be, Drew?’ Nicky had enquired lazily.
‘As high as you please, old fellow.’ The pole had been at its highest, just over seven feet when the hooves of Nicky Longworth’s roan had clipped it, sending the Squire’s son over its head to hit the ground with a force which stunned him.
Without a moment’s hesitation, ignoring the Squire’s grooms who had been about to dash across to the lad who was, after all, the son of their master and should be checked for damage, Drew thundered towards the pole, lifting his bay over it with half an inch to spare, narrowly missing Nicky Longworth who had the presence of mind to roll out of the way.
The handsome little mare was in the Greenwood stables by nightfall but the talk was that Joss Greenwood had better watch that touch of instability in his sons or they would not survive to see twenty. They were all wild, the young gentlemen who rode hard and took no heed of danger to themselves, but the Greenwoods had something about them, particularly since they had begun work in the family mills, which was more than foolhardiness. They seemed ready to fling down a challenge on the slightest provocation, strung high on nerves which surely would snap one day.
But the mare was lovely, and so was her foal. Pearce watched them together and though he was not awfully sure he would have attempted such a height, unless dared by his own brother, he would dearly love to own her.
‘It’s true, Pearce. It was all that damned arguing about my hair and how it should be dressed. Would I have rosebuds or ribbons and on and on until I could have struck her. Left to myself I would have tied it up and been down here at least half an hour before the dinner gong.’
‘You still wouldn’t have seen her born, just as we didn’t.’
‘I know, but I would have been here with you and witnessed some of it. She must have been nearly ready to give birth . . .’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, shut up, Tessa. It’s done with now so what does it matter?’
‘I’m only explaining why I didn’t come.’ Tessa gritted her teeth: it was most unfair of them to take this attitude just as though she hadn’t tried and tried to get down to be with them. They had no idea how difficult it was to be a girl. ‘It takes Emma hours to decide what I should do with my hair and then hours actually to do it. Plaited or coiled . . .’
‘Christ, Tessa, all we ever hear from morning till night is you moaning about that bloody hair of yours. If you are so persecuted by it why don’t you do what you are always threatening to do and cut it off?’
‘No one will do it, damn you.’
‘I’ll do it.’
They all turned to look at Drew, even Walter who had no idea what they were talking about and, really, was it any wonder? Their minds were like the sleek and beautiful blood animals they rode: fast, complex, skittish when checked, moving too quickly for him. Though he spent some time with them each day in the stables and paddock and was as adept as they in the saddle, he could never follow where they went.
‘You? What with? The gardening shears?’
‘If you like.’
‘Don’t be a bloody fool, Drew.’ Pearce’s voice was rough.
‘All right, then. If Tessa runs back to the house for her scissors I’ll cut it for her with those.’
Tessa looked into the indolently smiling face of her cousin. There was nothing she wanted more – was there? – than to be rid of the fuss and bother attached to getting herself ready for the day and how much time and argument she would save if she were not subjected to Emma’s ministrations, yet she hesitated. Drew was such a devil you were never quite sure where you were with him. He had a way of looking at you that dared you to gamble –
which was how he had won the mare – if you had the nerve. His violet-blue eyes were clear and innocent but his mouth slanted in a sardonic smile which she did not quite trust.
But she was a Greenwood, brought up as one anyway, and when had any of them ever turned away from a challenge?
‘Wait here,’ she said turning towards the door which led out into the dark stable yard and she knew by the way his eyes gleamed and the broadening of his smile that she had won his admiration.
‘Don’t be stupid, Tess.’ Pearce tried to put a hand on her arm but she shook him off. He shrugged and turned away so that neither of them could see the doubt in his eyes. Though she might be as undisciplined as himself and Drew when the opportunity offered, including herself in all the light-hearted escapades they thought up, she was still a girl. Despite the breeches she wore and her desperate attempts to follow wherever they went, one day she would be stopped and that day must surely be soon. She was almost seventeen years old and ripe for the pickers in the marriage market. What the hell would her mother do with her, and them, if she turned up at the breakfast table in the morning with her hair cropped like a man’s?
The scissors were in Drew’s hand when Pearce turned back to them. Walter, knowing at last what they were about to do, had reared off, his hand to his mouth, his face white, his horror so great Drew might have been about to plunge the blades into Tessa’s breast.
‘Eeh no, Master Drew, you don’t mean ter . . . ?’
‘Be quiet, Walter, this has nothing to do with you.’ Tessa’s voice was feverish as she placed herself within the reach of Drew’s hands and the snip-snip of the lethal scissors.
Walter moaned deep in his throat as the first gloriously shining strand, so thick and lovely he felt the urge to beg if he might have it, fell to the cobbled floor of the stable. Another went and another until all about the recklessly laughing young girl was a carpet of hair, the rich chestnut glints in it quite extinguished as though they had derived their life from the girl herself.
‘Dear God, you’ll catch it from Aunt Jenny,’ Pearce said softly and, like Walter, his young heart ached with something he could not describe as his cousin was stripped of her most obvious claim to femininity. What was left of her hair stood out in differing lengths, tufty, like the shorn skin of a rabbit, and beneath it her face had become as pointed and fey as a pixie’s. Her cheekbones appeared to have widened and become higher and more pronounced. Her eyes were enormous, glittering, so clear and pale a grey as to be almost colourless, piercing the semi-gloom of the stables like two of the new ‘electric rays’ which were, Pearce had heard, being used to illuminate Vauxhall Gardens up in London. Not that he had seen them, you understand, but surely they could not be more brilliantly lovely than Tessa Harrison’s eyes? Her small chin thrust forward challengingly and she laughed.
‘Well?’ she said, tossing her head which felt so light she thought she might float away.
‘Jesus . . . !’
‘Aah . . . Miss Tessa . . .’ and Walter looked as though he might weep.
‘Just a shade more here, I think,’ Drew said cheerfully, ‘and then under the tap with you.’
‘The tap? What on earth for?’
‘Trust me, little cousin.’
He towelled her wet hair with a bit of old horse blanket rubbing the short stubble which suddenly, miraculously, was no longer stubble but a moving cap of smooth darkness, clinging about her head, not in curls as her mother’s did, but in short and springing waves. They fell over her forehead and about her ears, hugging the nape of her long and shapely neck, outlining her neat head and producing in her a strange and bizarre beauty the likes of which had never before been seen in the Penfold Valley. It accentuated the width of her forehead and the delicate strength of her pointed chin, the pretty shells of her ears and the pale velvet-grey of her eyes.
‘Bloody hell, it actually suits you,’ Pearce blurted out in amazement and the curious and speculative expression on his face was mirrored in that of his brother. It was the look of a man confronted, for the first time, by a new and exciting woman, a look which says quite plainly that he is intrigued and more than a little willing to get to know her, to have her look at him with as much interest, and if she did not, the added thrill of persuading her to do so.
She did not see it, only the approval written on his face and that was all she wanted.
‘And what about you, Walter?’ She grinned at the stable lad who was staring, open-mouthed and slack-jawed at this dashing young lad who was very definitely not a young lad. Though her hair was shorter than his own, its boyishness merely served to emphasise the thrusting peaks of her high young breasts, the smooth white skin of her shoulders above the disarranged neckline of the dinner-gown she still wore, the slender shapeliness of her bare arms which he had never really noticed before, and the sight of it all took his breath away.
‘By gum, Miss Tessa,’ he breathed admiringly, letting his masculine appreciation show in the way his eyes ran over her, then blushing furiously he turned and blundered from the stable.
‘Well, cousin,’ Drew’s voice was somewhat husky and his fingers gripped the scissors fiercely, ‘it seems you have at least one admirer should the rest turn tail at the sight of you.’ They wouldn’t, of course, his eyes told her.
‘Fiddlesticks! I want no admirers.’ Her heart beat fast and joyously as she ran her hand through the delightful softness and lightness of her hair. ‘Come on, let me slip inside and up to my bedroom before Mother sees me or I’ll be for it. I’m sure you will want to ride over to the Hall tomorrow to tell Nicky Longworth of your new foal and I want to come with you. We’d best lie low until then or we’re bound to be stopped.’
For a second only she lost her nerve at the thought of her mother’s dark anger, then she tossed her head again as another thought followed, much more exciting.
What would Will Broadbent think? Would he look at her as approvingly as her cousins and Walter had done? Would his eyes warm with admiration, then narrow in that quite thrilling and masculine way which happened sometimes? Or would he laugh, treat her as an enormously amusing child, naughty and wilful and deserving of a spanking?
Well, what did it matter what Will Broadbent thought? His opinion meant nothing to her, she told herself, and if he so much as smiled when next she saw him she would . . . what would she do? As she lay in her bed, having avoided the servants and her family and gained the privacy of her room quite safely, she grinned wickedly in the dark at the thought of the fun there would be tomorrow.
7
The fox, being a night feeder, provides no sport early in the day and it would give her the greatest satisfaction, she decided, to arrive at the Hall amongst the Squire’s Friday-to-Monday guests before they set off in its pursuit. There would be aristocratic ladies and gentlemen, manorial families from Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cheshire and perhaps even further afield come for the start of the hunting season, booted and spurred, languid and bored and ready to be amused by anything for a lark, particularly the gentlemen who would approve of her own boldness in defying every convention enforced by society. It would give her even more satisfaction to see their faces when she whipped off her top hat to reveal the splendour of her new hair style which nobody but Drew and Pearce and Walter had yet seen.
No, she wouldn’t wear a hat. She would gallop up to the Hall with her short hair all about her head as she had seen her cousins do and would enjoy the vast consternation and be as outrageous as she pleased. She would ride with the wind intoxicatingly in her face and hair, through farmyards and over fences, showing them her daring and endurance, showing them that she was as able and strong and durable as any man there. Why she should want to do so never crossed her mind.
It was a clear and glorious day. The trees were almost naked now and the fallen leaves made a dry, rustling sound beneath the hooves of the horses, a splendid carpet of red, gold, green and brown. The fields had been harvested, then ploughed and the long, neat furrows reached into the dist
ance, orderly and somewhat business-like. Bright-eyed jackdaws disappeared in and out of them, hopping up and down with sprightly steps, and on the edge of the fields stood trees holding the former spring nests of rookeries.
The mellow October day was perfect, acting as a barrier between the last of the autumn and the bitter weeks of winter to come. There were still wild flowers bobbing their last blooms in the cool sunshine: the yellow buttons of tansy and orange of toadflax, the deep pink and white of fumitory, its fern-like leaf so fragile it looked like smoke from a distance.
Though she rode like the wind, leaping and diving, the thundering explosion of horses’ hooves in her ears, flat on her mare’s back across pasture and meadow, her companions close about her, hounds ahead, the clarion call of the horn, the spray of mud and river water, the scatter of earth thrown up by their passage, she was scarcely conscious of it, or them, as she moved through the day in some dream world, their noisy presence jostling about her like discordant ghosts. Her cousins were nowhere to be found when later the stable yard at the Hall was filled with the wild-riding end of the hunting party, hoof-beats erupting against the cobbles, the smell of steaming horse-flesh, the well-bred shouts of the fox-hunting set applauding the success of the day. Her own cheek carried the brown stain of dried fox-blood for she had been the first lady to reach the kill. There was to be champagne and they pressed her to stay but, for some reason, she found that the great and glorious sparkle with which the day had begun had evaporated. She could not have said why since she had been a huge success, showered with compliments on her appearance, her bravery and the glory of the kill, but really, she said politely to the Squire, who could not take his eyes from her flaunting and extraordinary beauty, she must be getting home since her ‘people’, speaking as they spoke, would be expecting her.
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