On that cool, windy night of Amos’ birthday, standing at her uncurtained attic window watching in bleak envy the small, flickering light that gleamed fitfully from an upstairs room in the cottage by the gate, Kitty, miserable tears sliding down her face, resolved to speak to her brother soon about leaving for London in a couple of months’ time.
(ii)
Determined as she had been, however, at the moment of making that decision, Kitty’s suggestion to Matt was never made. It was just four days later – four days in which an almost desperate Kitty retreated into a shell of silence, barely acknowledging Amos when they chanced to meet – that he, face unusually forbidding, stepped quietly into the kitchen where she was preparing the family meal and closed the door firmly behind him.
She stared at him, knowing the blood to be draining from her face. Then, very carefully, she put down the spoon she had been using and clasped her hands very firmly before her. She would not have him see their trembling. She did not speak.
‘Lost your tongue?’ he asked, harshly.
The roughness of his tone took her entirely by surprise. She blinked, took a sharp breath.
‘Well?’ A disturbing, pent-up anger was clear in his voice, in the brilliance of his eyes.
‘I – no – of course not—’
‘Well, you could ha’ fooled me these past days. Not good enough to talk to, am I?’
‘Amos – please—!’ She was shaking now, her brain and tongue paralyzed by his presence and his unexpected anger.
He stepped closer, only the width of the table between them. ‘You playin’ with me?’ he asked, very quietly. ‘Are you? You the kind of girl likes to make a fool of a man—?’
‘No! Of course not!’ He came around the table towards her. Incredulous, half-frightened, she stepped back from him. And yet she was aware of something else – aware that beneath her confusion and distress her heart had taken up a steady, driving beat of intense excitement. She loved him, oh, how she loved him! And he was here – his angry attention concentrated upon her alone. The thought flashed into her mind that she would not care if he struck her. The recognition of that appalled her. She lifted her head fiercely. ‘Don’t come a step nearer! Don’t dare!’
He stopped. Had she been a little more experienced she might have recognized the flicker of calculation in his eyes. Then he turned away, hands spread upon the table, shoulders hunched almost to his ears.
She held herself rigidly from him.
He lifted his head at last. ‘God, Kitty – I’m sorry. Truly I am. It’s only that – since the other day—’ He shook his head, his face a boy’s again, pleading, ‘I couldn’t stand it that you might hate me—’
‘Hate you? Hate you?’ There was a small, incredulous sob of laughter in the words. ‘I don’t hate you.’
Something gleamed again in his face and was gone. She caught her breath, knowing that she had betrayed herself.
From above their heads a weak voice called, ‘Kitty?’
‘God Almighty!’ Amos said, voice ragged with frustration.
‘Kitty!’ Martha’s voice was querulous.
Kitty cleared her throat. ‘Coming.’
‘Kitty – wait—’ He caught her hand as she turned. ‘We can’t leave it like this. You know we can’t. Meet me. Tomorrow. We have to talk—’
She stared at him, wordless.
‘Five Acre Barn,’ he said, his voice low and rapid. ‘You know it?’
She did not reply.
Almost he shook her. ‘Kitty! Do you know it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tomorrow afternoon. About three. I’ll meet you. Pa’s going into Colchester, so we’ll be in by then.’
‘I—’
‘You’ll be there—’ The words were imperative, only barely a question.
Of course she would not. The suggestion was outrageous.
‘Kitty—! You’ll be there!’
‘Yes,’ she said.
* * *
How she got through the endless day she never could afterwards recollect. After an all but sleepless night she had climbed tiredly from her bed determined not to keep the tryst; but one glance at Amos’ unsmiling, questioning face in the soft light of an April dawn before he and his father left for the Girl May undid all those hard-won resolutions at a stroke. As the day wore on she swung exhaustingly upon the pendulum of her emotions, swinging from a wild anticipation that took no count of right or wrong to an utter determination not to go. Then, as the hour approached, the innate and uncompromising honesty that was her pride and her bane forced her to admit it – since he had spoken those words, ‘You’ll be there,’ she had known that she would be, and that no power on earth would stop her.
She left the house at a few minutes to three, the basket that was to be her excuse if questioned swinging in her hand. Half a mile along the track from the house she struck out across the fields to where the barn known as the Five Acre stood, on a rise of ground overlooking the wide Blackwater, sheltered by a grove of wind-twisted oak trees. The day was fine and clear, high clouds scudding across the blue vault of the spring sky, their fast-moving shadows dappling earth and water beneath them. Out on the water stood the wing-like sails of the oyster fleet, very close together, hardly moving as they dredged with the tide, their manoeuvres like the stately, esoteric patterns of a dance of which only they knew the steps and the purpose. She watched for a moment, her eye caught by the peaceful beauty of the scene. Seabirds wheeled and called above the little smacks. A mile or so away the smoke from the clustered chimneys of the City drifted fragrantly in the air.
By contrast to the bright day the lofty interior of the vast barn was dark, cool and still. She paused at the wide empty doorway, its cavernous, dusty depths awaiting the year’s harvest. A bird fluttered about the soaring, ancient beams of the roof. Gleams of sunlight, sharp as bright needles in the gloom, glinted through holes in the tiles of the roof and the planks of the wooden walls.
‘Amos?’ Her uncertain voice echoed to the vaulted roof.
Silence hung like a curtain. Dust motes stirred, shimmering in the air about her as she stood, tense and waiting.
Her heart sank. He wasn’t there. He hadn’t come. Had probably never intended to come—
‘Amos? Are you there?’
There was a flash of movement in the shadowed darkness, and there, smiling, he was. Against all real hope, all expectation, he was waiting for her.
She knew and did not care that all the longing and love she felt for him was in her face as she turned to him.
Neither spoke. In a few long strides he reached her, caught her shoulders with quick strength, pulled her to him, covering her face, her hair, her neck with kisses. Drowning in the excitement of it she clung to him, her hands in his hair, on the wind-roughened skin of his face, touching his features with her fingertips as if struck blind and seeing him with her touch. When they drew apart they were both trembling, and the silence was a strange one: what words now could explain, excuse, debate?
He retained a hold upon her hand. ‘Kitty,’ he said softly at last, and then again, ‘Kitty.’ And it was as if that simple repetition of her name were enough to settle all arguments, answer all anguished questions. ‘Lovely, lovely girl.’
She shook her head, blushing.
‘Oh – yes. I thought so the very first time I saw you, with that wild, white face and lovely eyes—’
Wordless she reached a hand to his face, touched his lips, warm and soft, lightly with her finger. The scuttling, whispering darkness of the barn enclosed them. They might have been alone in creation. She thought she had never seen anything so truly beautiful as his face, shadowed and smiling. And in that moment the world’s judgement mattered not a fig. ‘I love you,’ she said, simply, and there was such relief in the saying of the words that she could have sung with sheer happiness. ‘I love you,’ she said again.
He laughed softly, teasingly, throwing back his head. ‘And I thought you hated me!’
&nbs
p; ‘Of course I didn’t,’ she said and then, with strange and gentle perspicacity, ‘You knew I didn’t.’
Perhaps wisely, he did not reply to that, but drew her, unresisting, deeper into the darkness to where a pile of dry, fragrant hay was piled against the wall. Laughing still, he sank back into it, pulling her after him. At the last moment, however, she let go of his hand, and as he lay, arms wide, smiling up at her she sat almost decorously beside him, straight and still, her long legs tucked beneath her spreading skirts, her hands clasped in her lap.
He folded his arms behind his head, narrowed his eyes as he watched her. ‘Take down your hair,’ he said abruptly, then as a soft afterthought, ‘Please.’
She did not move.
The long, tangled lashes flickered, veiling but not hiding the bright devil of excitement in his vivid eyes. ‘Please,’ he said again, the intense word as much command as plea.
She could not resist him. At that moment she would have done anything he had asked. Slowly she unpinned the heavy coils of hair, shaking them out onto her shoulders, veiling her face as she bowed her head.
He reached a long arm, coiled an uncompromisingly smooth and straight lock about his finger. Then he reached further, tangling his hand painfully into her hair, pulling her to him. She did not fight him. He pulled her on top of him, then as they kissed rolled over so that his body pinned hers beneath it. As suddenly as a leap of flame a searing excitement took her, wiping her brain clear of everything but the fiercest desire she had ever known, a wild conflict of submission and aggression that melted her body beneath his whilst her long, strong fingers and sharp teeth matched his force with a strength and wildness of her own. He shuddered, burying his face in her disordered hair. She felt his fingers at the buttons of her bodice and she stilled, biting her lip, fighting a small lift of panic.
‘Kitty—’ he said. ‘Kitty – help me—’
Never in her life had her breasts been bared to a man’s eyes. That alone – the expression on his face as he looked at her – before he had touched her swelled them and engorged the teats. With lips and tongue then he teased her, until, arching her back, she moaned a little. He transferred his mouth to hers, stifling her breath, taking her wet nipples between roughened thumb and forefinger, squeezing and pulling lightly and rhythmically with a relentless, practised, sweetly painful force. The waves of excitement that took her were all but unbearable. Then he pulled away from her and was kneeling above her, the dramatic, gilded head outlined in the light thrown by the dipping sun through the doorway, his face in shadow. Their wild movements stilled for a moment. She lay waiting, trembling, for the first time afraid. His eyes never leaving hers, he reached to her disordered skirts.
She moved her head sharply, in an almost unconscious, panic-stricken negative.
‘It’s all right,’ he said in a voice that beneath its gentleness was threaded sharp with excitement. ‘I won’t hurt you. I promise. I won’t do anything to hurt you. I want to see you, that’s all. To touch you. I won’t hurt you – I promise I won’t hurt you—’
Almost hypnotized by his voice and the brilliance of his eyes she lay, still as a rabbit that is prey to a stoat. She did not move as he pulled her skirts to her waist and deftly untied the tapes of her drawers. As if from very far away she heard her own voice, ‘No – please—’ Another whisper in the whispering darkness.
He took no notice. His swift hands moved with sure confidence and then she lay all but naked in the darkness, the warm air cold as shame upon the pale, fine skin of her belly and thighs. She was shaking now, uncontrollably, with fear and with that intolerable excitement that his touch induced in her.
‘There, now. Gently. Gently—’ Fingers, lips, tongue, feather-light, shockingly arousing. Never had she dreamed of such pleasure, of such enslavement to touch and sensation. He knelt above her, mastering her, and affording her, she realized as she lay beneath his knowing fingers, the extremes of pleasure that for the moment he denied himself. A tide of delight rose mercilessly from his manipulating fingers, and she abandoned herself to a climactic violence of pleasure and pain that burned in her body like fire, a fire that fed upon itself, demanding and addictive. She reached for him, crying his name. He held her for a moment as she drifted in darkness upon waves of weakening sensation. Then, ‘Now—’ he said, and his voice was harsher, more urgent. ‘Now, pretty Kitty – you’ll help me, won’t you? See – like this—’ He guided her hand, smiling into her astonished, half-frightened eyes. ‘Ah, no – don’t cover yourself. Let me see you. Now – kiss me—’ He too was now all but naked, his slim body a flame of white in the darkness. ‘Kiss me there – and yes! Like that! – don’t worry – you won’t hurt me—’ And the darkness of that strange afternoon deepened and became more complex as she explored his willing body and watched its power pulse and grow and then spend itself beneath her hands and questing tongue. She had not dreamed herself capable of such things – guilt and shame crouched within her, waiting – waiting for the inevitable aftermath of such sin, waiting to lift a leering head and promise the punishment that must surely follow such wickedness. Yet as she lay beside him, her face buried in his naked shoulder, she could not bring herself to regret. She loved; with her body and her soul she loved. That, surely, could not be entirely wicked? Yet she was downcast and silent as, avoiding his eyes, she dressed and recoiled her hair about her head, and he noticed it.
He lifted her chin with his finger. ‘What’s this?’
She shook her head, eyes downcast.
His smile, had she seen it, held a small glint of gentle triumph. ‘Silly girl. Tell me.’
She turned from him. ‘You know. You’re married—’
‘You knew that when you came here this afternoon. Yet still you came.’ The tone had a sudden, hard little edge to it that turned her back to face him, anxiously.
‘I didn’t mean—’
He stopped her mouth with his, the momentary harshness gone. ‘Of course not. Darling Kitty – pretty Kitty – listen to me. My marriage to Maria is no marriage. You must know that? The moment I saw you I knew you’d understand me as she never could. We’re doing no one any harm, you and I. How could we be?’ He stopped, watching her intently. She shook her head, bemused. ‘You’ll meet me again? Here?’
She hesitated for only a moment. ‘Yes.’ There was a finality about the word that frightened her a little – yet there was no other answer she could give.
He relaxed, smiling again. ‘I’ll let you know when.’
‘Yes.’
He kissed her again. ‘We’ll have to go. You first, I’ll follow in ten minutes or so. We must be careful.’ The words were matter-of-fact. Dimly she perceived that the deception had begun.
She nodded, turned to leave, then stopped, driven to saying just once more those words that she had denied herself so often, the words that made wrong right and excused everything. ‘Amos, I love you.’
She saw the flash of his smile in the shadows before she stepped into the world beyond the cool darkness, submitting herself to the sword-stroke of light and warmth beyond the door, and refusing for a moment to consider the fact that not once in all their whispering and lovemaking had he used those words to her.
* * *
Her world became dominated by Amos, her days measured by the times of their meeting, her life ruled by her desire for him. She prevaricated shamelessly, to herself no less than to others, in order to see him, however briefly, to touch him, and also to convince herself that what they did was not truly wrong. So consuming was her reckless infatuation that such considerations as pride and honesty, until now her touchstones, weighed little against it. There were of course occasions when the sharp teeth of guilt and doubt gnawed like rats in a far dark corner, when her good sense and dignity struggled to reassert themselves; but a swift, hidden smile, a glimmer in the lucent eyes as he looked at her and she would be lost again. There were times when she wondered if her feelings and her deceptions were not too transparent, for she was ill-
used to subterfuge. Was it her imagination that Maria’s hostility to her had deepened? That the resentful glances that she had grown used to receiving from the charmless Hannah now seemed to hold an unpleasantly sly and knowing gleam? But when such worries assailed her she reassured herself that it could not be so. Her conscience might be sleeping, but it was by no means dead, and if she jumped at shadows she had at least the sense left to see those shadows for what they surely must be – the reflections of her own guilt. In her heart she knew that what she and Amos were doing was wrong, and could come to no good end. In moments of honesty she knew there to be no future for her with him. Yet this first passion of her young life so ruled her that she told herself she did not care. She lived for the day and for the sight of Amos, for their swift glances and their bittersweet hours in the great barn that had become their haven. Her tender conscience she salvaged with that magic word ‘love’ – they loved, so what they did could not be judged by the yardstick exercised by ordinary people in ordinary situations. Her suspicion that she was not the first nor likely to be the last to use this perilous reasoning to justify the unjustifiable did nothing to prevent her clinging stubbornly to it. On the gale-swept day in May that she surrendered her body to him, fully and willingly, she felt no added burden of guilt. He had her soul already in his keeping; to yield her body to his pleadings and so assuage their fierce hunger for each other was a small thing by comparison. They lay together afterwards and listened to the wild summer rain that lashed from the sea to fling itself in fury at the great wooden walls of the barn, and in the storm-filled silence she seemed to hear the words ‘I love you’ so clearly in her heart that almost she could convince herself that he had spoken them.
During the first days of June, with the oyster fishing season finished till autumn and the spring’s lambs growing plump upon the sea-girt grasslands, Martha Isherwood, in drawn-out anguish and almost at cost to her life, bore to Jonas another lusty son, Thomas Paul. The prolonged and painful labour, culminating in the barbarously agonizing, life-and-death struggle of birth, appalled and frightened Kitty. During the week that followed she and the slatternly midwife from the City fought to keep the guttering flame of life burning in the pallid creature who lay unmoving in the big bed, showing interest neither in her newborn child nor in the tiresome ministrations of those who fought to save her. Despite a spent lack of co-operation on her patient’s part, Kitty refused to give up. Stubbornly she stayed by Martha, talking, cajoling, scolding, forcing the exhausted woman to take broths and soups, refusing to listen to her feeble protests. And then as summer settled in at last to the world beyond the latticed windows and the swallows and martins swooped, calling, about the eaves of the old house the ebbing tide of Martha’s strength was stemmed and, painfully slowly at first, her health began to improve.
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