Shining Threads

by Audrey Howard

  Today she was not here. Today was the day he had known would come. Today he was finally alone.

  ‘Where is she?’ he said quietly, hopelessly. ‘Tell me or I’ll break your bloody neck.’

  They were laughing, the three of them, as they almost tumbled down the awkward stairs into Annie’s kitchen. Will was dressed in a clean shirt and breeches but had no shoes on his feet and Tessa had stepped on his toes with her high-heeled boots.

  ‘Watch where you’re going, woman, and don’t push me, Annie. Give me a minute to get my breath, after all I am an invalid and this is my first time downstairs.’

  ‘Dear God, are we to have this wail of self pity every time you move that lazy frame of yours, Will Broadbent? See, lean on me and hold on to the table . . . there, the chair is right behind you . . .’

  ‘Christ, I had no idea I was so weak.’

  ‘An’ I’ll ’ave none o’ that language in my kitchen, if yer please. Now, sit thissen down, lad, an’ I’ll get thi a glass o’ milk.’

  ‘Confound it, not milk again, Annie. I’ll have it coming out of my ears at this rate.’

  ‘Never you mind, Will Broadbent. It’ll put some o’ that flesh back on thi bones an’ a bit o’ strength in thi legs, then ’appen th’ll be able ter see to thissen. ‘Tha’ll not be leavin’ ’ere fer a week or two yet so just get that down yer an’ ’ave less ter say.’

  ‘D’you mean I am to have you bullying me for another week?’ But he obediently drank the milk, his eyes on Tessa, his whole demeanour, though striving to be cheerful and determinedly resigned to her going, telling her that he didn’t know how he was to manage without her. His heart was in his eyes, loving her, worshipping her, begging her to stay with him, to keep them together as they had been in the last few days though his mind told him she must go. She was dressed in the gown she had worn to the makeshift hospital in Ashton Lane. Thomas was to call for her in an hour and their life was to go on, hers and Will’s, just as it had done before his illness. He could remember the desolation which had claimed him only a week ago when he had come across her and her husband as they roistered over the tops. He had thought her to be fickle, empty and fit for nothing but the life she led with Drew Greenwood, a woman who could play with two men and thrive on it, but now he knew the width and depth of her love for him. She had had no need to explain to him what she had been doing up there, where she had been going on that day. There was no need for disclosures between them, nor avowals of eternal love. His head and his heart were clear now and ready to absorb the full and lovely gift of her complete devotion. What they would do tomorrow, next week, or next year he did not know. She loved him. She had risked her life, her health, her marriage, her reputation for him and in future he would accept from her only what she could give him of herself. His eyes told her so and she smiled, understanding.

  ‘I must go, my darling.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I will come as soon as I am able.’

  ‘I know you will. Perhaps . . .’ But she knelt before him placing her fingertips against his lips. He kissed them gently and Annie turned away, leaving them to their farewell. Will was looking into Tessa’s face and the two women had their backs to the door when it opened, only the sudden shaft of sunlight which streamed across the kitchen telling them that someone stood in the doorway.

  Annie was the first to turn and the empty glass she held fell from her fingers to shatter on the stone floor. She uttered no sound but every drop of colour drained from her face, even from her lips. She put out her hand in some gesture of defence, aimed, she was aware, at Tessa and Will, the two people she loved best in the world, but the man in the doorway had eyes for no one but the couple by the fireplace. Tessa had turned, still on her knees and when Drew Greenwood lunged, whether at her or the man she had been kissing, Annie was not sure, she fell back awkwardly against the brass fender. He said nothing, her husband. He was completely silent which was the more terrifying since always before his rages had been loud and explosive, strident with his runaway temper. He kicked her to one side as she tried to scramble to her feet and his hands, strong and brown and lethal, reached for Will Broadbent’s throat. They circled it, sinking deep into the loose flesh which had come with Will’s illness. Drew’s face was contorted, livid and snarling and his eyes were narrowed, a dark and vicious blue. Though Will put up his hands to grip his attacker’s wrists he was no match for the younger, more vigorous man. He had been ill and though he was making a steady recovery, his body was weakened, frail still, his enormous strength and power melted away by the fever.

  ‘Drew.’ Her scream was chilling, high and filled with despair. Like some old, old woman whose age has taken her spirit and whose strength is too frail to lift her, Tessa scrabbled on the floor, reaching with desperate hands to find some purchase on her husband’s steel-like legs. She could hear Will’s breath choke in his closing throat then it was cut off and the silence contained nothing but Drew’s frantic gasping and the drumming of Will’s feet on the floor.

  ‘Annie . . .’ Still she tried to lift herself, to drag Drew away but he was maddened to brute strength and nothing could break the grip of his fingers about Will’s throat. She watched in absolute horror as one of Will’s hands dropped slowly to the arm of the chair, then fell to hang limply beside her face.

  ‘Hit him, Annie’ she screamed, but Annie was paralysed with shock and Tessa knew, quite calmly now, that she was the only one who could stop Drew Greenwood from killing Will Broadbent. She was the only one who could save his life.

  Save him for the second time in a week, she remembered thinking incredulously, then her hand found the heavy brass poker and with her strength renewed she brought it up, then down again and across Drew Greenwood’s forearms. She distinctly heard the bones snap and her husband screamed before he fell away, stumbling back against the table, then back again to the doorway through which he had come.

  ‘Tessa . . .’ His voice was no more than a whisper. His eyes were on her, huge and clouded, not just with pain and shock but with despair. The rage had gone and the madness, and there remained only a childish uncertainty, a need for her to tell him that she was there, as she had always been there and that he had only to hold out his arms to her and she would fly into them as she had always done.

  But he couldn’t lift his arms. There was something wrong with them and so she had turned to the man in the chair and was holding him instead.

  Blindly he turned into the sullen heat and smoky sunshine and began to run.

  The men found him wandering along the track towards Badger’s Edge, muttering and already feverish, his useless arms hanging limply at his side.

  ‘Come along, Mr Drew,’ Walter said gently, putting a hand on his master’s shoulder since they had been told to be careful of his arms which had suffered a serious injury.

  ‘Who is it?’ his master said, swinging away wildly, then crying out with the pain of his flailing arms.

  ‘Tis Walter, sir.’

  ‘Walter? What are you doing up here?’

  ‘Us ’ave come ter fetch thi ’ome, sir. Tis gettin’ dark an’ thi’ll not be able ter see thi ’and in front of thi face afore long.’

  ‘No, indeed. I had not noticed . . . It has got dark, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  ‘And who is that with you?’

  ‘Tis only Percy an ’Jack, Mr Drew.’

  ‘But where is my bay, Walter? I cannot return without my bay.’

  ‘Er . . . ’e come ’ome a while since, sir. You were throwed.’

  ‘Never, not me, not me, eh Pearce?’ and he laughed boisterously over his shoulder into the darkness.

  The three men stood about him warily. He had fallen, Mrs Greenwood had said, thrown from his bay in the street outside Miss Beale’s cottage in Edgeclough but had immediately regained his feet and run away. It sounded daft to them but who were they to argue? There were some funny things going on these days at Greenacres what with Miss Tessa away up at
that mill when not so long since she’d hated the very sight of it, same as him. And what was she doing at Annie Beale’s place with Annie no better than a common mill-worker, and in the company of Mr Broadbent who had once been an overlooker?

  Still, it was nowt to do with them. They were used to Mr Drew and Miss Tessa and their wild ways and had become accustomed to their strange and unconventional behaviour. Find him and bring him home, they had been told. Look in the direction of Badger’s Edge or Friar’s Mere for they were the most likely places he would be. And here he was, and poorly by the sound of him.

  He wandered along beside them, laughing over something he seemed to hear on the still, warm air. He talked all the time incoherently, and his dead brother’s name was constantly on his lips. They tried to help him, even to carry him for he kept straying off the track and was difficult to lead back, but he screamed when they touched him.

  It was midnight when they met the carriage on Reddygate Way, just where the edge of town spilled out on to the moors. They managed to get him inside and home to his wife who was waiting on the steps at the front of the house.

  ‘Darling, there you are,’ they heard her say, then Hibberson and Mr Briggs were there, and old Doctor Ellison since Doctor Salter was still busy at the warehouse in Ashton Lane which was now a hospital, it was said.

  Doctor Ellison strapped up his arms, considerably surprised at the suddenness with which his patient had changed from incoherent delirium to an almost trance-like state, scarcely seeming to notice the pain he must be suffering. And the watery loosening of his bowels was not quite normal, nor the dramatic onset of vomiting. Drew Greenwood’s face had become cool and withered, drawn almost, and his pulse was too faint for the doctors liking.

  ‘We must try to get some fluid into him, Mrs Greenwood, and do go and lie down yourself for a while . . .’ His patient’s wife looked none too strong herself. ‘Let your servants clean up this . . .’ He indicated the foul-smelling man on the bed whom his wife was trying frantically to keep clean. ‘I shall remain in the house, naturally.’

  At some time during the night, Tessa could not have said when exactly since she must have dozed, she found Laurel standing next to Drew’s bed, her hand on his brow, her face pale and worried.

  ‘He seems to be cooler,’ she whispered when she saw Tessa’s eyes on her. ‘Do you think it means he is about to come out of this . . . this . . . ?’ She could not seem to find the word to describe the strange state her brother was in.

  ‘I hope so, Laurel,’ Tessa said softly and though her pity for him put truth on her lips she could not help but wonder what was to happen when he did.

  ‘Would he drink some of this lemon wine Mary Abbott sent over with her coachman? It is thought to be strengthening and the doctor said he was to have fluids.’ Laurel placed the tray on which was a cut-glass jug containing a pale lemon liquid and three glasses on the bedside table.

  ‘He seems to be sleeping and I shouldn’t wake him but perhaps I might try some. I’m dreadfully thirsty.’

  ‘I might join you.’ Laurel poured them each a glass of the cordial in which ice chinked and as they sipped it they watched over the mumbling, restless man on the bed. They finished the jug between them and the last thing Tessa remembered was the quiet click of the door as Laurel left the room.

  The pestilence, carried in the water from which the kind Mary Abbott had brewed her refreshing lemon wine and which was to kill four of her own household began its secret and deadly work during the night.

  It was about noon the next day when Tessa began to hallucinate. She distinctly saw her mother in the doorway, her face stern and disapproving, and behind her Charlie told Tessa that it was no use in arguing, someone must mind the mills. She stood up then, leaving the flushed and mumbling figure on the bed, and moved to the window. She was surprised to find it standing wide open since she felt so terribly hot. She really must change her dress for it was wet through with something which had soaked right into the fine cream foulard and it clung to her skin most disagreeably. She lurched back to the bed and placed a trembling hand on Drew’s brow but could not make up her mind whether it felt cooler or if perhaps the extreme warmth of her own skin only made it seem so. And she felt so nauseous. She really ought to eat something, she supposed, since she was quite light-headed. When had she eaten last? She couldn’t remember. Perhaps if she asked Pearce who had just sat down beside Drew if he would stay with him for a while she would go down to the kitchen . . . or should she ring the bell to summon Emma? No, Uncle Joss and Aunt Kit stood in the shadows and . . .

  It was some time later, she couldn’t have said how long, when she found herself on the floor, her cheek pressed into some foul-smelling stickiness on the carpet. Lord, she felt dreadful. So hot and tired. She’d just lie here for a while and then she’d get up and give . . . Who was it on the bed who tossed so fretfully? . . . Pearce? . . . Drew? . . . She didn’t care really but whoever it was would need a drink. If only Laurel would stop shrieking about the fever and God striking someone dead for bringing it into the house to threaten the children . . . Who . . . who were the children? . . . Robert? . . . Her head hurt so she could barely think . . . and where was Will? Her dear Will . . . she wanted Will, his arms about her to help her up and keep her steady . . . Will . . . Will . . .

  It was delightfully cool when she awoke, clean and cool. She was in her own bed and though she felt amazingly weak her mind was clear and at peace. She had memories, small and puzzling, like pieces of glass which have shattered and fallen, jumbled, and though she knew what they were, they would not fit into an exact and recognisable shape.

  Her mother had been here, many times, weeping. Why? she had thought since it was not like her mother to weep, leaning over her, touching her face and smoothing her hair back from her forehead as she had never known her to do before. And Annie. She could recall awakening to find her in the chair beside the bed, in the dark of the night, the firelight playing on her dozing face, thinner than Tessa remembered her. What on earth was she doing here, she had thought, quite astonished, for Annie had so much to do on the Relief Committee and with the Poor Law Guardians.

  And had she dreamed that Emma had been at her bedside, spooning some stuff, milky and sweet, into her mouth, cross with her when she refused to open her lips, begging her to try, to be a good girl and try? Emma had cried, her head on her bent arms on the side of the bed, her face tired, thin and drawn. And Dorcas. Good, sensible Dorcas had been heaping up the fire with coal though it was so hot Tessa thought she had died and gone to hell.

  It was like fighting a way through cobwebs, but perhaps the sharpest, sweetest, most disturbing dream had been about Will. He had leaned over her and kissed her. Many times. Warm, comforting, safe. He had never wept like the others but bore her up to a place which delighted her; a place in which he and she had shared moments of truth and beauty. His amber-flecked eyes had smiled and his hands were strong in hers. He had spoken softly to her, bringing her peace and she had slept in the shelter of his arms.

  The light from the sky beyond her window was a pale green, the clear aftermath of an evening sunset. She thought she heard the whinny of a horse and the answering call from another. She turned her head and there was Emma, a newspaper in her hand, no longer weeping as Tessa had last seen her, but calm and at peace. Tessa smiled and wondered what her maid was doing reading at her bedside, ready to tease her for it, to make her jump guiltily. And where was Drew in the midst of all this tranquillity? Perhaps it was his bay she had heard a moment ago and soon he would come bursting into the bedroom, striding across the room to lounge indolently at her side, sending Emma shrieking to the kitchen.

  But he did not come.

  ‘Where is Mr. Drew, Emma?’ she asked, but Emma did not lift her head from her absorption in the newspaper.

  ‘Where is Mr Drew, Emma?’ she asked again, shouted, she thought, and this time Emma looked up and the most amazing thing happened. Emma stared speechlessly, her mouth open, her
wide eyes beginning to leak tears. Tessa felt a small prick of exasperation for, really, there was no need to be so dramatic. It was a simple question needing only a simple answer: “He has gone up to the Hall,” or “He is downstairs, shall I fetch him?” But Emma sat speechless and motionless just as though Tessa had caught her out in some dreadful act of which she was utterly ashamed.

  ‘Miss Tessa?’ she said, or rather, asked, as though she was not awfully sure. Her hand reached out vaguely in the direction of the bed.

  ‘Of course, Emma. Who else?’ The words were tart and came out of her mouth in somewhat of a croak, surprising her. She swallowed and her mouth was dry.

  ‘Oh, Miss Tessa, darling . . .’ With a great surge of apparent heartache which she could no longer contain, Emma sank down to kneel beside the bed, weeping as though her heart really was split in two. She sobbed and sobbed, her face buried in the smooth white counterpane, her neatly capped head bobbing with the intensity of her weeping.

  Tessa was astounded. Surely there was no need to be quite so distraught? What on earth was the matter with the girl, for goodness’ sake? Perhaps she herself was the reason for Emma’s mournfulness. Had she been ill? Was that why Emma was weeping so grievously? Whatever it was Emma was dreadfully upset.

  ‘Emma, for God’s sake girl, calm yourself and get me up.’

  ‘Oh, Miss Tessa . . .’

  ‘Never mind, “oh, Miss Tessa”. Get me up,’ she ordered. This time Emma raised her head, bemused it seemed and quite unable to do more than stare in wonderment at her mistress’s face.