‘Collins.’ Sir Percival’s voice lifted a little.
‘Yes, Sir?’
‘My cane. I left it in the house. Fetch it.’
The man glanced at Matt, grinned wolflshly. ‘Yes, Sir.’ He turned and ran towards the house.
Almost reflexively Matt began to struggle then, fiercely and with a strength born of panic. Then as suddenly, realizing the futility of it, he stopped, stood quite still, watching his tormentor with wide dark eyes.
His hand still moving constantly upon the dog’s head, Sir Percival looked about him, his cold eyes moving, slowly, from face to face. ‘Understand this. I am master here now, whether you will it or no. Watch well. And learn.’ He nodded sharply to the giant who held Matt. With a sudden twist the man turned the boy towards him, trapping the dark head beneath his massive arm. With one hand he held him so; with the other in a single apparently effortless movement he ripped the shirt from the narrow, sun-browned back. Kitty heard someone, a girl in the crowd, sob fearfully. Cook muttered behind her. She stepped forward. ‘Sir Percival – I beg of you – it was a childish prank!’
The man did not even glance at her. His eyes were upon the boy’s exposed, curved back, the young spine clearly defined, vulnerable as glass. ‘You will all stay,’ he said, quietly. ‘It will, I believe, do no one harm to have it clearly understood who is master at Westwood Grange. And to discover too that I will not tolerate as my uncle tolerated—’
‘Here, Sir.’ Collins elbowed his way through the sullenly silent crowd. In his hand he held Sir Percival’s long, silver-headed cane.
Sir Percival stepped back. For the first time the hand that rested upon the dog’s head was absolutely still. ‘Lay it on well, Collins. Teach the young villain that stealing is an activity best avoided by an employee of mine.’
The beating was the most appallingly vicious thing Kitty had ever witnessed. Matt had been beaten before – and for much the same reasons – handed over to groom or bailiff by an exasperated and over-tried Sir George. But never like this, in public, as a spectacle and by a man who obviously took his cue from his detestable master and sadistically enjoyed the infliction of pain. The first blow broke the smooth, child’s skin. By the third Matt was screaming, the sound blistering the hot summer air. By the time his screams had reduced through anguished moans to silence, Kitty, her face tear-drenched, her arms secured in grim friendship by two white-faced labourers, had lost count of the strokes. Men murmured angrily. Many of the women, young and old, were weeping, heads turned, hands covering their eyes. Collins, sweating, stopped for a moment, wiping his dripping forehead with his sleeve. Matt was silent, his breath rasping like a dying man’s. Kitty broke free of the hands that restrained her and flung herself forward, catching Sir Percival’s arm in frantic hands. ‘In the name of God, stop it! You’ll kill him!’
Pale eyes looked into hers. A hand gestured, negligently. With obvious reluctance Collins lowered the arm he had raised to strike again. The big man who had been holding Matt let him go and straightened. Kitty’s brother, his back a bruised pulp of blood and torn skin, collapsed onto the cobblestones like a dropped sack of potatoes. As Kitty turned to run to him, a small hand, steel strong, detained her. ‘Remember, girl, this time he got off lightly. Next time, if he survives the beating he gets, he certainly will not survive the hulks. No man, woman or child on this estate – my estate’ – he emphasized the pronoun very slightly, the drawl back in his voice – ‘will flout my will or the law with impunity. Cousin—’ He turned to a pale, trembling Anne, her face tear-streaked, and smiled a little as she trembled from him. ‘I’d be dashed grateful if you’d conduct me back to that excellent madeira?’
Cook it was who, infinitely gently and with a face like thunder, tended Matt. Kitty hovered about her as she bathed and poulticed the bloody mess that was the lad’s back, whilst Matt’s breath hissed through clenched teeth and the look in his eye promised murder and worse. When Cook had finished and gone back to the kitchen Kitty sat with her brother through the night, soothing the boy as best she could as he swung through childish, pain-filled sobs to outraged protestations at the injustice he had been dealt. ‘It was a game – tha’ss all – a game – I was going to give it all back – I was!’
Kitty, gently, shook her head. ‘Matt – Matt! How many times must you be told? Thieving is never a game.’ And then, later, ‘You should not have taken the coin. Will you tell me you were going to give that back too?’
Her brother, biting his swollen lip, turned his head away.
At last, with the dawn, he slept. But Kitty could not. She sat with him as the pearl-light of daybreak gave way to the bright sword-stroke of the rising sun. She was exhausted, her body aching as if she too had been beaten. Stiff and sore she struggled to her feet, flinching. The sky beyond the window was infinitely clear, the air sparkling fresh. The rising sun glittered dazzlingly upon the moving waters, as if nothing but good could exist in the world.
She walked a little-frequented track to the beach, not wanting to see anyone, not wanting to be seen. She had never, she realized, hated anyone before. But now as she thought of Sir Percival and his henchmen – yes, and the whispers of Imogen Alexander – hate curdled in her like sickness. What in the name of God was to become of them all in the charge of such people?
She almost fell over Anne, huddled in that very spot for which she herself had been making, the sheltered place in the lee of a ruined sea wall that had been their refuge in times of stress all their shared childhood. The sea crashed, cold and foam-laced, gleaming with light, a few yards from them. With no words Kitty dropped to the chill, tide-damp shingle beside the other girl, buried her fingers in the tumbling stones, feeling their wet smoothness against her skin.
With an obvious effort Anne roused herself at last. ‘How’s Matt?’
‘In pain. But he’s sleeping now.’
Anne looked bleakly into the shining distance. ‘You must both come with me,’ she said at last. ‘You and Matt. We can’t leave him here.’
Kitty looked at her, too tired to question. Anne’s fair hair was disordered by the wind, her thin face that had been so plump and pretty, but that looked now like a waif’s, was tear-marked. For the first time it occurred to Kitty that here was something other than Matt’s trouble. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m to marry Mr Winthrop,’ Anne said, tonelessly. ‘As soon as may be. My – cousin’ – she spoke the word bitterly – ‘is assured that it is an excellent match.’
‘What does he know of it? He only arrived a day since?’
Anne turned sadly weary eyes upon her. ‘What did he know of Matt?’
Kitty, in her mind’s eye, saw a smooth, bent head, pursed busy lips. ‘Miss Alexander.’
‘Of course. She is set upon making herself indispensable to our new master.’
‘Well in that,’ Kitty said with bleak satisfaction, ‘she’ll be disappointed. He’ll use her and discard her—’
‘—as he is discarding me. Oh, Kitty – he is worse, far worse, than we ever imagined he could be—’ She bent her head in silence for a moment, fighting tears. Then: ‘We’ll leave,’ she said, suddenly firm. ‘You and I and Matt. We’ll go together. Mr Winthrop is a kindly man. He will care for us.’ There was a small silence. ‘Kitty – you will stay with me? You always promised—’ An urgency that was close to desperation threaded her voice.
Kitty nodded dispiritedly. ‘Of course.’
They sat together in the sea-washed morning silence for a very long time. ‘Do you know,’ Anne said at last in a voice so low that Kitty could hardly hear it, ’that I have nothing now? Not a single penny, to take to Mr Winthrop. Cousin Percy says I am a pretty encumbrance he has inherited with the house. He says he cannot afford to dower me, as Father would have. He has – gambling debts, I believe—’ She stopped, a catch in her voice. ‘Oh – Kitty! – what if Mr Winthrop won’t take me now – dowerless, penniless! What will become of us then?’
Kitty reached a comforting ha
nd to hers, but said nothing.
Chapter 2
(i)
In the event Mr Winthrop took a worryingly – not to say unflatteringly – long time to decide that a dowerless and orphaned Anne was as desirable a bride as he had found her such a short while earlier. Whilst poor Anne drooped and wept and huddled within her rooms in the changed house that had for all her lifetime been her home, the old man hemmed and hawed and prevaricated until it came to an exasperated Kitty that she would like nothing so much as to bang his head upon his own mounting block. Was it not true that a bare three months before his heart had apparently been set upon the girl? Yet now, given a chance to rescue her from a situation that daily became more intolerable he hesitated and hedged, talking of a decent time to consider and to mourn, of changed circumstances and unforeseen difficulties. Kitty found herself wondering, perhaps uncharitably, if he were not hunting swiftly about the district to discover if there were not some other girl on offer whose father had not so inconsiderately died and left her penniless.
‘He will not take me,’ Anne wept, disconsolate, ‘he will not! And then – what shall I do?’
‘Nonsense. Of course he will. And – even if not – Mr Winthrop isn’t the only man in the world.’ Kitty threw back the curtains that Anne would have her leave draped, cave-like across the windows. ‘Why must you tie your hopes to his coat-tails? Why, just a few weeks since – oh, Anne, Anne, please – don’t cry again. You have to stop. You really must—’
But, at first, she could not. And small wonder, Kitty sometimes thought, for all her bracing words, seeing the changes that had come so shockingly unheralded into her life and her circumstances.
Sir Percival Bowyer did not like Westwood Grange, and he made no effort whatsoever to disguise the fact. He did not like the rambling, old-fashioned house, its situation or the responsibilities that it brought. However, for reasons that were never made entirely clear but which were endlessly discussed in the servants’ hall, always to his detriment, he and his appalling little dog were clearly determined upon making their home there – any hole, as Cook liked darkly to point out, being welcome to a hunted fox.
The quiet life of a Suffolk country gentleman was not, however, in the least to Sir Percival’s tastes, and he went out of his way to ensure that he need not live it. Unable, under the same quirk of law that had caused him to inherit, to sell the place, he set determinedly about filling it with as many of his London cronies as he could entice for any length of time away from the drinking dens and gaming tables of town. To begin with he was fairly successful in this – a success that had its roots first in his guests’ curiosity, secondly and perhaps more importantly in their eager willingness to live in some style for nothing, and thirdly in the weather. August and September were dry, warm months, mellow and beautiful, and the roads, if dusty, were easily passable. Week after week the house was full, riotous till long after midnight and dead till noon.
The estate, for this time at least, more or less ran itself, the year’s planning and care already lavished and bearing fruit, the harvest good. As to next year – men of cottage and farm shook their heads. Time would tell but they had no great hopes. Sir Percival in his management veered characteristically from despotic decree to undisguised and short-tempered disinterest. He wanted his rents and his profits; he knew nothing and cared less about the efforts that needed to be made to secure them.
Day after day, week upon week, there seemed to Kitty to be a constant and dizzying coming and going in the courtyard that had once rung so rarely with any undue excitement: arrivals and departures of strange guests, with their valets and servants (who always managed, she noticed, to make themselves scarce if there were extra household tasks to attend to); strange horses in the stables. The servants grumbled, Sir Percy, uncaring, issued more invitations and Anne continued to wilt like a cut flower. Within a week the cellars were emptied and the call sent out for more – a call that was readily answered by those who had already marked out the new owner of the Grange as a likely customer for their night-run goods. Remembering Matt’s beating, Kitty found herself reflecting bitterly more than once upon the gentry’s interpretation of honesty as spirits and tobacco were welcomed to the cellars of the Grange, as well as bolts of silk for the ladies, a surprising number of whom braved the journey to the wilds of Suffolk to join the exiled Sir Percival and aid him in his efforts to spend his unexpected inheritance.
‘The goings-on in this house,’ Cook said one day, heavily, ‘are no less than a scandal. With Sir George an’ those poor lads barely cold in their graves—’
‘Mrs Roberts.’ Imogen Alexander’s voice from the doorway was sharp and acid with sarcasm. ‘When you are ready – some of Sir Percival’s guests are in the breakfast room. Waiting – dare I say it? – for their breakfast.’
‘Breakfast, is it?’ Cook, one of the few in the house in no way in awe of the governess who, insidiously and in the absence of a mistress’s hand, had taken over the role of housekeeper, swung ponderously upon her. ‘Breakfast? At twelve noon? And where? Where is this – breakfast room?’ She invested the last two words with a world of scorn.
Ruby giggled.
Miss Alexander quelled the girl with a glance. ‘The breakfast room, Mrs Roberts, as you well know, is—’
‘At the top of the stairs where the parlour used to be. An’ where the parlour still is, as far as I’m concerned. Seems to me that did Sir Percy say so some of us’d be callin’ cats dogs—’
Tight-lipped, Imogen Alexander left. Muttered words that sounded remarkably like ‘stuck-up madam’ followed her none too quietly to the door.
‘I doan’ know ’oo that woman do think she is—’ Cook attacked her risen bread dough with fierce hands.
Kitty, come to the kitchen for a dish of soup to tempt Anne’s failed appetite, tossed the straight, heavy hair from her eyes and swung the weighty saucepan onto the stove. ‘She hopes, I think, that if – when – Miss Anne leaves Sir Percy will keep her on as housekeeper.’
Cook lifted her head. ‘An’ is there word of that?’
Kitty shook her head.
Cook sighed. ‘Poor lamb. Who’d ha’ thought – Oh, Ruby! Fir pity’s sake, child! What ha’ you done now?’
Poor Ruby, always clumsy but worse if hurried, had dropped on the flagstoned floor the great silver dish into which Beth, Cook’s assistant, had been about to deposit the breakfast kidneys she had been frying. At Cook’s angry tone Ruby flinched, picking up the dish with shaking hands.
Cook’s own hands, flour-white, were lifted in despair. ‘If you can’t hold the blessed thing empty what in heaven’s name will you do with it full? Where’s Thomas?’
Ruby, a frail, nervous girl, always easily cowed, blinked back tears. ‘’E’s bin called away. Summat for Sir Percival. An’ them others – them visitors – they’re nowhere to be found. There’s on’y me. An’ Beth.’
‘Well, I in’t servin’.’ Beth, a large, phlegmatic young woman with a round face and wispy fair hair, turned back with unshakable determination to the stove. ‘I got enough ter do ’ere, an tha’ss a fact.’
Kitty smiled reassuringly at the trembling Ruby. ‘I’ll help. The soup isn’t ready yet. Perhaps when it is Beth would run some upstairs to Miss Anne. Here – let me help with that dish.’
The parlour – now designated the breakfast room, furnished as such and the scene most days of a leisurely meal that might commence at any time between eleven and noon when the first yawning guests appeared and that could after a particularly energetic night go on to two or three in the afternoon – was almost empty. Kitty and the relentlessly nervous Ruby transferred vast dishes of bacon, kidneys, sausages and cold meats from the trolley to the side-tables beneath the window. Enormous baskets of bread and rolls and a great slab of fresh-churned butter joined them. Beyond the ancient, rippled glass of the window the day had turned grey and windy; heavy clouds billowed above the distant, white-capped water and seabirds hovered, beating against a gusting wi
nd that was the early harbinger of winter. Ruby dropped a knife with a great clatter, sucked her bottom lip in a terror she seemed totally incapable of controlling.
‘Let me.’ Gently Kitty took the enormous silver teapot from the girl’s shaking hands. ‘You put the napkins on the table.’
Two young men, one dark as the other was fair and both of whom might from their dress and mannerisms have stepped from the self-same bandbox as Sir Percival himself, stood by the fireplace conversing loudly, ignoring the two girls as they would ignore the presence of any servant. A third – a long-legged, languidly handsome young man with soft, floppy hair and a dissolute face – slouched alone in an armchair. In contrast to his companions’, his eyes, their expression unreadable, flickered once or twice from Kitty to Ruby, then remained on the nervous girl, speculative and unpleasant.
‘—just a bit of a setback, that’s all. The damned Yankees can’t possibly win. The South’s is a gentlemen’s army. They cannot be beaten. They’ve got the officers, d’you see? And the officers have the devotion of their men. It can only be a matter of time. There’s no question of that.’
‘Well – Pa says we need the cotton. And jolly little of it’s getting through—’
‘It will, it will. Mark my words. The North can’t win. Damned rabble of Republicans and freed slaves. Don’t stand a chance.’
‘I just hope you’re right.’ The fair young man was gloomy. ‘I only know that at the moment we’re losing money hand over fist, and Pa’s talking about cutting my allowance—’
‘God forbid,’ said the languid young man from his armchair, his eyes still on Ruby. ‘What happens to my profits at the card table if your Pa cuts your allowance?’
‘You certainly cleaned me out again last night.’ The words were rueful, but not particularly resentful, rather a comment upon an unfortunate and recurring act of God, like rainstorms or colds in the head.
Kitty set the tea things upon a small table.
Sweet Songbird Page 4