* * *
In a strange way she was not surprised when Jonas Isherwood appeared two days later at the back door of The Cups, asking for her. He was a plain-spoken man, and made no bones about his errand. She could take his offer or leave it. He was a Mersea man, an oysterman with his own small smack and a few acres of ground which he farmed with his eldest son. His wife Martha, as Kitty must have seen, was poorly, very poorly; breeding again and not strong. For the past months, since the departure of the girl they had employed since Becca’s birth, she had been left alone to cope with the house and the children, and the task was beyond her. Josiah had been much impressed to hear of the way Kitty had handled the children; in fact Martha herself had begged him to find the girl who had helped her so efficiently and ask if she might be willing to come and work for them. The pay was fair – seven guineas a year and found, and every Sunday afternoon free. His offer made, he waited, watching her. She wondered if he ever smiled.
Two days before she had seen Matt. He had been drunk as a lord and in company with two sharp-faced, red-lipped girls, each at least five years his senior. She had seen a ring glitter upon his finger that no honest money could have bought.
Yes, she said, she would take the post, and gladly. And if he would give her just a few minutes to speak to Mrs Barlow and pack her few possessions she would be ready to leave at once.
So it was that, just three days before Christmas 1863, Kitty Daniels rode out of Colchester on a jolting cart that reeked of fish and in the bottom of which a few gnarled, granite-coloured shells rattled, down St Botolph’s, past an ancient-looking church with a great gateway beyond, up a hill and past a windmill that groaned as it turned and into the wide, windswept, waterlogged country that stretched to the coast and the island of Mersea, of which until today she had never heard.
As she huddled shivering in the bitter easterly gale she thought of the note she had left at The Cups for her brother, in case it should occur to him to look for her, and wondered, bleakly, if he would even notice she had gone.
Chapter 4
(i)
Mersea Island, five miles long and a scant two wide, separated from the Essex coast by the tide-washed fleets and inlets of the River Blackwater, its only link with the mainland the ancient causeway known as the Strood – which was in winter months as often below water as above it – was a bleak place at the best of times. On the stormy December day that Kitty, huddled beside Jonas Isherwood on the high, unprotected seat of his ancient cart, rattled and jolted across the Strood with wind-whipped waves dashing and swirling almost to the horse’s hooves and an early winter darkness clamping a bitter hand upon the flat and almost featureless landscape of the island, she thought she had never seen a place so desolate. So low-lying was the land, so encroaching the besieging waters whose lapping creeks and inlets reached greedy fingers into the scrubby marshland, that in the half-light the usually clear distinction between the two was blurred, and Kitty found it impossible to discern where the one stopped and the other began. The sea-wind stormed across the island unhindered, lashing the tough, flattened grass, howling in the bare branches of the few weather-battered trees. Every so often the cart rolled past a small, slate-roofed or thatched cottage huddled upon the edge of the marshland, the smoke from its hearth snatched low from its chimney by the demon gale, the faint, tallow-lit glow of its windows the very spirit of human comfort in the darkness.
‘Do – do we have much further to go?’ Kitty had to shout to make herself heard above the wild elements.
Jonas Isherwood did not take his eyes from the rutted road along which the old horse picked its patient way, head down and unhurried. ‘Couple o’ miles.’
Beneath her heavy shawl she hugged herself, tucking her cold hands into her sleeves. They had moved a little way from the water now and were travelling flat, winter-tilled fields. ‘Are we going to a village?’
He shook his head. ‘Farmhouse. And cottage. Mile or so outside the City.’
The City? She glanced at his dour, uncommunicative face, surprised, wondering if she had misheard, but he elaborated no further upon his words. It was in fact a week before she discovered that to the islanders the village of West Mersea was known, and as far as anyone knew had always been known, as the City; though why a community of a few fishermen’s cottages, oyster and winkle sheds and less than a thousand souls should be so called was a mystery.
Half an hour after this exchange, just as Kitty was despairing of any end to the cold and discomfort, Jonas clicked his tongue at the horse, the cart turned into a narrow lane and they were at their destination. She saw the house, at the end of the winding, hawthorn-hedged lane, some time before they reached it. It stood solid and four-square against the stormy sky, sheltered by a great evergreen tree – a holme oak, Kitty later discovered – that tossed and roared in the wind. As the cart clattered through the open gate that led into the yard Kitty noticed a small cottage, set to one side and unlit, though welcome light glimmered through the windows of the main house.
‘Whoa! Whoa there—!’ Jonas Isherwood drew the horse to a standstill outside the side door of the farmhouse. ‘Amos! Amos – are ye there?’ He turned to Kitty. ‘Ye’d best get inside,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Ye must be perished.’
She was. Stiffly, her bones brittle with cold, her body aching from the relentless jolting of the cart, she scrambled down from the high seat and stood for a moment outside the door, clutching her small bundle. Before she could knock the door opened, and a tall, slim figure, head haloed in gilded light, stood before her.
‘Amos? Come on, lad – help me with Betsy. The poor beast’s fair worn out.’
The tall young man lifted a hand in acknowledgement and, smiling, stepped past Kitty into the yard, the wind catching at his silvered hair and his shirt.
‘She’s here!’ A small figure hurtled through the door and Jeremiah caught her free hand, swinging on it as if it were a dangling rope, grinning his imp’s grin. She smiled back and, light as he was, lifted him, one-handed, off the ground.
‘Jeremiah – please—’ Martha had appeared behind him. Beyond her Kitty could see a large, cluttered room, dimly lit and untidy but at that moment the most welcoming sight she had ever seen. She allowed Jeremiah to pull her through the doorway as the young man, Amos, took the horse’s head and led the tired beast off into the darkness. Martha shut the door, leaning hard against it in the wind. With Kitty into the room came a gust of winter, icy fingers of air that fluttered and swirled about the guttering candles and lamps and brought a puff of fragrant woodsmoke from the great open fireplace that warmed the disordered room.
Kitty found herself the focus of several pairs of eyes, regarding her with expressions that ran the full course from friendly greeting to – to Kitty’s surprise – an unsmiling wariness that came close to hostility. The children she had met in the market were there – Hepzibar and Zacharius, sprawled upon the floor, bickering amiably over a heap of chipped glass marbles, Jeremiah still swinging in proprietary fashion upon her hand, Becca in her mother’s arms, and the other little boy whose name she later learned was Daniel, who regarded her with solemn interest from behind his mother’s skirts. At the big table sat a young woman of perhaps nineteen or twenty years, nursing a baby, a toddling child at her knee. It was this girl’s striking eyes that regarded Kitty watchfully, flickering from her face to her ill-shod feet, their expression totally lacking in greeting.
Kitty smiled uncertainly. ‘Hello.’
The girl nodded slightly but neither smiled nor spoke.
Martha Isherwood fluttered nervously between them.
‘Kitty – you don’t mind being called Kitty? – this is my – that is Mr Isherwood’s – daughter-in-law, Maria. She’s married to Amos – who is Mr Isherwood’s son by his first marriage. The two little ones are Joseph and Benjamin. They live in the cottage that you passed by the gate – but much of the time—’ She trailed off.
Kitty waited for a moment to see if she were going t
o finish the sentence, then said, a little formally, ‘How do you do?’
The girl nodded again, ungraciously. She was a strikingly attractive young woman, with a mass of dark hair and a strong, discontented mouth. Kitty, remembering the tall, gilt-headed young man she had met at the door, found herself thinking they must make a handsome pair. Certainly the two little boys were the prettiest she had ever seen, the older one with his mother’s dark eyes and his father’s fair hair, the younger also blond, and blue-eyed, his cherub face bright with laughter. Yet there was about both children a faint air of neglect – dressed as they were for bed yet still their hair held the tangles of the windy day and their hands were grubby.
‘And – Hannah must be somewhere—’ Martha Isherwood looked vaguely about her.
‘In the kitchen. Gettin’ supper.’ Maria’s voice was harsh, low-pitched.
‘Oh – yes, of course. Hannah’s our maid—’ Martha’s voice was nervously distracted as she tried to disentangle Becca’s sticky fingers from her hair. ‘She’s a good worker, really – but no good with the children. Well – you can’t expect—’ As before, she seemed to lose track of what she was saying. ‘I’m – so glad you agreed to come—’
There was a short, awkward silence.
On the floor the bickering had changed its nature and was reaching quarrelsome proportions.
‘You did!’
‘I didn’t.’
‘You did!’
‘I didn’t, I tell you! I gave you exactly the same!’
‘Zach! Hepsi! Please—’
Predictably they took not the slightest notice of Martha’s ineffectual exclamation.
‘You didn’t! You’ve got more! You cheat! The red one’s mine – give it me—’
‘It isn’t. I won it!’
The opening of the door and the entrance of Jonas and his son on another swirl of wintry air put a stop to the hostilities as if the draught had blown out a candle. And Kitty took note that the children, if they disregarded their mother, certainly held their father in more respect. She turned, colliding as she did so with the young man Amos who, laughing, caught her elbow to steady her. He was more than a head taller than she, and very slight, though his shoulders were wide and the work-hardened hand on her arm was strong. He smiled down at her. Damp silver hair fell across his wide forehead. He flicked it back. His naturally fair complexion was burnished by sun and wind and in the dark face he had the very bluest eyes she had ever seen, fringed with lashes as long as any girl’s. Absurdly and embarrassingly, for one strange moment she could not look away. Then, ‘I’m – I’m sorry—’ she stammered.
He smiled, white teeth in that weather-brightened face, and stepped back from her, crossed to his wife, stood smiling down, his hand on the soft down of the baby’s head. Maria scowled up at him.
Martha was speaking. Kitty turned. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Your room – you’ll want to rest before supper—’
‘Oh, yes. Thank you.’ She felt suddenly tired, and overwhelmed by them all. Her hair was a bird’s nest, her face still painful with cold, as if the wind had flayed the skin from it. ‘I should certainly like to tidy up.’
‘I’ll show you. Hepzibar, take the baby—’ Martha dumped the child into her reluctant sister’s lap and straightened, smiling shyly at Kitty. ‘This way.’
She picked up a lamp and led the way through a door and up a steep flight of stairs. A narrow, windowless landing flanked by closed doors ran the length of the house. At the end of the landing another short flight of steps, almost ladder-like, led to a low door. The attic room beyond was tiny, with an uncurtained dormer window about which the wind shrieked and whistled, wood-lined walls and ceiling and a very small fireplace in which, blessedly, burned a few coals. The room was barely large enough to hold the bed, washstand and tiny bedside table that were all its furnishings. Martha opened a little door next to the fireplace to reveal a deep, slope-ceilinged eaves cupboard. ‘You can put your things in there.’
‘Thank you. I don’t have much.’
‘Supper’s ready when you like. We’ve been waiting.’
Not for the first time it occurred to Kitty that she had no idea of her standing in the household. Mere servant? Nursemaid? Companion? ‘I won’t be long,’ she said a little awkwardly. ‘If I could just take a few minutes to tidy myself?’
Martha’s hands fluttered. ‘Of course – of course – please – don’t worry. When you’re ready—’
As the door closed behind her Kitty dropped, sighing with relief, onto the bed. She felt bone-tired. Her back and buttocks ached from the uncomfortable ride from Colchester. She sat for a moment, very still, eyes closed, breathing deep and steady. Wind buffeted the window. Rain had started now, hitting the thick glass like handfuls of flung gravel. She opened her eyes. There was a chill in the room, the coals that burned in the grate barely warming the cold air. Suddenly and determinedly brisk, she reached for her bundle, undid it and hunted for her hair brush. A jug of cold water stood upon the washstand. She poured some into the bowl, splashed her face and hands, rubbed them dry with the coarse towel that hung on the rail of the stand. Then, brush in hand, she set about unpinning the heavy brown hair and brushing out the tangles, watching herself in the big, old-fashioned, damp-specked mirror that hung above the washstand. Her hair sparked and flew. She brushed harder, letting the long, smooth strokes soothe her, closing her mind to thought.
And there slipped into unwary consciousness a picture of a pair of very blue eyes in a weather-darkened face, of windblown silver hair heavy across a wide forehead.
She stood absolutely still for a moment, staring at herself, her winged brows drawn to a ferocious frown. Then, with fingers brusque to the point of roughness, she twisted her hair into a thick brown rope which she wound deftly about her head, tucking in the stray strands, patting and smoothing with long, square-tipped fingers. She brushed the dust from her skirt with her hands, settled her shawl about her shoulders, looked for another long, repressive moment at the thin-faced reflection in the mirror, then turned and left the room once more to face the Isherwoods. The ones she had expected – and the one she had not.
(ii)
As she had herself recognized, Kitty’s status in the Isherwood family was an ambivalent one. She was not a member of the family – yet neither was she entirely a servant. Everyone but the maid Hannah, a surly, orphaned child of thirteen years who clearly resented the advent of another voice to order her about, called her Kitty; everyone, that is, but Maria, who rarely addressed her directly and never at all by name. In a very short while Kitty came to accept the other girl’s ungracious lack of friendliness and shrug it off – indeed it seemed simply to reflect Maria’s relationship with the rest of the world. Even for her handsome husband – whom Kitty, though she never admitted it to herself, took great pains to avoid – she rarely had a smile or a soft word. To Kitty herself it seemed that her place in the household was as housekeeper, nurse, governess, chief cook, occasional bottle washer and general factotum. In those first days after her arrival her largely self-appointed task – made so by the fact that Maria Isherwood seemed utterly incapable of doing any appointing of her own – had been to organize the family’s Christmas – a bare three days away and, she had discovered to her horror, next to nothing done. At first wary of Maria’s reaction – Amos’ wife, after all, might have been the natural successor to the ailing Martha in the running of the household – she soon realized that the girl had no interest at all in the task, and so the day after her arrival she set a resentful Hannah to help her clean, polish, sweep and scrub the main rooms of the house. In daylight she had discovered it to be every bit as ill-kept as it had looked in the lamplight; and yet the old house itself, though fallen a little from former glory, was spacious and attractive and worthy, Kitty thought, of rather more than the neglect that had clearly been its lot for the past years. Built a hundred years before for a prosperous oyster merchant, it stood square and solid beneath its anc
ient tree, outhouses and stabling forming a cobbled courtyard at the back, where stood the well that supplied the house with sweet water. Apart from the cottage a few hundred yards away there were no neighbouring buildings, and grass- and marshland swept to the distant estuary. The village of West Mersea – the mysteriously named ‘City’, and the only village of any consequence on the island – lay a mile or so away, and it was from the City’s beach, known locally as a ‘hard’, that Jonas, Amos and a couple of village lads worked the oyster grounds in Jonas’ eleven-ton smack, the Girl May. On those three cold December days Kitty threw herself wholeheartedly into the task of preparing the house and its inhabitants for the coming festival. She was up with the menfolk in the dark, pre-dawn hours, rousing sleepy, protesting Hannah – who in the past, having first fed the master and his son and seen them on their way, had been in the habit of creeping back into the warm pallet in front of the kitchen fire that was her bed – and if she rested for more than half an hour between then and the time she fell exhausted into bed she counted it as time wasted. She also discovered that in hard work and weariness there was some antidote to the heartache caused by the fact that throughout those days and the days that followed there came neither sign nor word from her brother. That her frantic activity also kept her mind from dwelling upon Maria Isherwood’s disturbingly attractive husband was something she tried not to think about.
The house gleaming, she set the older children to gathering evergreens for decoration. Christmas Eve was spent cooking and baking in the big, warm old kitchen, a task which she enjoyed immensely, despite the fact that the whole tribe of young Isherwoods, of whom she was already becoming very fond indeed, showed themselves determined to congregate to watch her efforts and steal what they could of the results. Martha spent the first half of the day fluttering ineffectually about her, making in her eagerness to help an easy task difficult. In the afternoon, however, she was, to Kitty’s somewhat shamefaced relief, overcome by what she described as ‘one of my headaches’ and was easily prevailed upon to retire to bed. The children too tired at last of the novelty of Kitty in the kitchen and disappeared in ones and twos to get up to the devil knew what mischief elsewhere. Hannah had been sent on an errand to the village – a trip from which Kitty already knew from experience she would return at her own pace and in her own time – and Becca alone was left, sitting happily occupied on the flagstoned floor, two spoons and a pan lid her absorbing toys.
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