Sarah's Story

by Lynne Francis

April – September 1875

  Chapter 32

  It was with some trepidation that, for the very first time, Sarah used the front-door key that Mr Sutcliffe Senior had given her. She had called in on Martha as she’d made her way back from Nortonstall on the afternoon that she had signed the lease. As she walked, she’d turned the great iron key over and over in her pocket, feeling nervous about what lay in store. By the time she arrived she had worked herself up into quite a state, imagining all manner of things that might be lying in wait within the neglected building.

  Martha was delighted when Sarah begged her to spare a few moments to accompany her inside; she had been bursting with delight and curiosity ever since she had heard that Sarah and her grandmother were to be her new neighbours.

  ‘Mr Sutcliffe said that the side-door key must be within the house as he doesn’t have it,’ Sarah said as she inserted the key into the lock of the front door. She had expected to have a struggle, but it turned without too much difficulty, perhaps because the solicitor had so recently visited.

  As the door swung open, a cold, damp smell greeted Martha and Sarah. Telling herself to expect the worst, Sarah led the way inside, taking note of a decent-sized if drab parlour and a large kitchen overlooking the tangled and overgrown garden. Everything was dusty and all the windows were festooned with cobwebs, but Sarah already felt a little surge of hope. It would require a lot of cleaning but she noted that the kitchen was home to a big dresser to house all their crockery, and the pantry was a good size.

  Martha was beaming. ‘I can see it already. All neat and clean. It will be a lot of work, mind, but I’ll lend a hand and I’m sure there’s others in the village who’ll be glad to help out when they can. With a bit of luck the weather will stay fine – being able to open up the windows to air the place will make all the difference.’

  Sarah stood at the bottom of the staircase and looked upwards. ‘Shall we?’ she said to Martha. Martha nodded, so Sarah mounted the wooden steps, taking care in case of worm damage. Luckily all seemed sound and soon they were viewing the three bedrooms that led off the landing. These were stripped bare but with decent wooden floorboards and views out over the fields at front and back.

  Sarah turned around slowly in the biggest of the bedrooms, taking it all in. ‘It has a nice feeling, I think,’ she said. ‘Although it is dusty and dirty it isn’t as bad as I feared it would be. Of course, Mr Sutcliffe is used to much grander residences. He must have thought it a very poor affair. But I think Gran, Alice and I could be happy here. And Joe, of course,’ she added hastily. ‘At times I forget about him; he’s here so little,’ she apologised. ‘Is that very wrong of me?’

  Martha smiled. ‘Not at all. Men are best forgotten about, on the whole.’

  They both laughed, Sarah feeling some sympathy for Martha, whose husband was an irregular visitor too, working away in Leeds and, if village gossip held a grain of truth, preferring to stay there and sample the delights of the racecourse and inns rather than come home, even when a holiday presented itself.

  Sarah didn’t feel that she could keep her grandmother away from Lane End Cottage, even though she would rather have found a way to put it to rights by herself to spare Ada the exhaustion of it all. Her grandmother was waiting anxiously in the garden when she arrived back at Hill Farm Cottage, impatient to know whether she had the keys. A mop, scrubbing brushes and brooms and pails waited just inside the kitchen door.

  ‘It’s too late to make a start today,’ Sarah protested. ‘But I have visited and it’s not quite as bad as I feared. Although that doesn’t mean that it won’t take a lot of work to get it to be anything like this place.’

  ‘No matter,’ Ada said. ‘I’ve been well accustomed to hard work over the years.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Sarah said, scooping up Alice and giving her a squeeze. ‘Let’s just hope that this little one behaves herself so we can get on with it.’

  ‘We will at least have a bit of extra help.’ Ada flourished a letter that lay on the kitchen table. ‘Daniel writes to say that he is going to come and lend a hand. He will be at the local mill at the end of the week, and if we can give him a bed on the floor he can help on Saturday afternoon and Sunday.’

  ‘A bed at Lane End Cottage?’ Sarah was dubious. ‘It’s not really in a fit state and there’s not a stick of furniture there.’

  ‘We can sort that out,’ Ada said briskly. ‘It’s but Wednesday today; I’m sure we can achieve something before he’s due.’

  And they did. By the time Daniel opened the gate to Lane End Cottage on a Saturday afternoon that was unusually warm for late April, the floor had been swept in one of the bedrooms, every nook and cranny dusted and the windows washed. The walls were still drab and there was just a straw pallet and a blanket for a bed but the room smelt fresh and sweet, the windows flung open to allow the breeze to blow in from over the fields.

  Ada and Sarah had at first given in to the temptation of trying to do a little bit here and there, overwhelmed by just how much did need to be done once they looked closely, but before too long they had settled into working together on one room at a time. With a bedroom prepared for Daniel’s use, they had turned their attention to the kitchen, which is where he found them, Sarah with her hair wrapped in a scarf to protect against the dust and up to her elbows in soapy water as she washed down the walls. Ada was concentrating on the windows, scrubbing away at layers of grime to reveal a vision of tangled ivy, brambles and weeds that made up the garden. Both turned flushed, hot faces to the door as Daniel entered and both were happy to drop what they were doing to greet him.

  ‘Right, now that I’m here, how can I help?’ He’d been welcomed and shown around the place; if he had any doubts about what they’d taken on, he was keeping them to himself.

  ‘We must eat something first,’ Sarah declared, ‘then we’ll make a plan.’

  With the furniture still in Hill Farm Cottage, there was nowhere to sit. The garden was too overgrown to accommodate them, so they stood by the kitchen window and looked out as they chatted and ate the bread and cheese that Ada had packed, along with a pork pie that Martha had kindly provided. She had volunteered to care for Alice that day while they worked, and she popped round now to bring her for a feed, and to be introduced to Daniel for the first time.

  Introductions over, Daniel announced that he would make a start on the garden as he had a wish to be outside after a week spent working indoors. Ada looked stricken.

  ‘I didn’t think to bring any tools for the garden with me,’ she said.

  Daniel declared himself happy to go up to Hill Farm Cottage and fetch them but Martha stepped in to offer the loan of anything that she had. Daniel worked in the garden until the light was all but lost, while Sarah and Ada scrubbed and swept, polished and mopped. Sarah would have carried on longer if she could have, but she was exhausted and there was still the road home to be climbed and dinner to be prepared. Once again Martha came to the rescue, summoning them all to her house for supper. They fell upon the food she had made, none of them able to speak until at least half of their plates were cleared and their energy partially restored.

  Daniel having declared himself content to bed down for the night at Lane End Cottage, Ada, Sarah and Alice headed home. When they arrived the next morning he was already hard at work. With weeds, brambles and scrub already removed from a good third of the back garden he’d turned his attention to the front, saying that if they would be moving in soon they’d not want to be looking out on a forest of weeds, so they left him to it.

  Sarah and Ada climbed the stairs to tackle the other bedrooms. They’d brought bread and cheese to see them through lunch and they were determined to go home that evening and make a proper dinner for Daniel to thank him for all his help. But whenever they thought to pack up for the day, another job presented itself. In the end, Martha came in to them.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Ada, you’ll not have the chance to live in this house, for it’s an early grave for you unle
ss you stop right now.’

  Sarah looked guiltily at her grandmother, who did, indeed, look wan with exhaustion. She should have called a halt much earlier. Daniel was burnt by the sun, his forearms scratched and freckled with blood and his shirt torn in places where further battles with brambles had taken place.

  ‘Now get your hands and faces washed and come away next door, all of you. I’ve been baking, so we have fresh bread and a ham pie, along with new potatoes and lettuce from the garden and I’ve stewed some rhubarb.’

  Martha waved away their protests that they couldn’t impose on her again.

  ‘Am I to eat it all myself?’ she asked. ‘It’ll only be a feast for the rabbits if I don’t make use of it. I know you’d do the same for me.’ She paused to take a good look around. ‘My word, though, look at how much you’ve achieved.’ She went over to the kitchen window and looked out. ‘You can actually see the size of the garden now. It’s much bigger than I’d remembered.’

  Daniel had returned to the back garden after working on the front and it was now three-quarters cleared. He’d created a huge pile of brambles, ivy and weeds, all drying out under the sun and waiting to be burnt.

  Lane End Cottage now looked and smelt clean, but the drabness of the decoration meant that the gloom hadn’t lifted and so the full extent of Sarah and Ada’s work wasn’t revealed. Despite the endless buckets of dirty water that they had sluiced away they felt a sense of despondency, only increased by their weariness.

  ‘I’m not sure it will ever be put to rights,’ Ada sighed.

  ‘Now, now,’ Martha scolded. ‘I won’t hear a word of it. The place is sparkling clean and just needs a coat of limewash to make it fit for you. Come and eat, do. You’ll all feel much better about it with something in your bellies. And Alice has been missing her mother.’

  Sarah felt a second pang of guilt. She’d barely given Alice a thought throughout the weekend. If it hadn’t been for Martha’s kindness in caring for her, and for all of them, they would never have achieved half of what they had done.

  Chapter 33

  Sarah woke with a feeling of unsettling panic on the Monday morning. Daniel had said goodbye to them on the Sunday, standing in his shirtsleeves at the gate and waving until they were out of view as they walked homewards up the lane. He’d promised to leave the key with Martha when he left for work the next morning. Sarah and Ada had fallen into bed barely ten minutes after reaching Hill Farm Cottage and Sarah woke with a start at dawn, when Alice’s grumbling cries turned into full-blown wails. She had fed her, then settled her back into her crib, where Alice had gazed a while at the patterns that the sunlight was making on the ceiling, before the pair of them had drifted off to sleep again.

  An hour later, there was no ignoring the fact that Alice was well and truly awake again so Sarah rose once more, aware that every muscle in her body ached from the weekend’s exertions. Her arms and shoulders were particularly sore, and her contemplation of the amount of work still required to make Lane End Cottage fit to move into had occasioned the sense of panic.

  They had so few days left in which to prepare the new cottage and pack up Hill Farm Cottage as well, which wouldn’t be a simple task. Sarah made her way downstairs to get the day underway, Alice clutched to her shoulder. She winced as each step pulled on her overworked calf muscles. Unusually, her grandmother was already seated at the table. Wordlessly, she poured a cup of tea for Sarah.

  ‘How are you feeling this morning?’ Sarah was concerned. Ada was a good forty-five years older than her and she had worked every bit as hard as Sarah the day before.

  ‘My bones are creaking with every move I make and I could swear that my back is broken,’ Ada complained. ‘We can’t go on in this fashion. We must simply do what we can over the next few days and then move in. Whatever work there is left to do we can complete once we are there.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Sarah said, secretly relieved. ‘I don’t think I can face lifting a mop nor bucket, let alone a paintbrush, for a day or two.’

  ‘There are remedies waiting to be made, too,’ Ada said. ‘The weather has been good so I must harvest whatever herbs have come into season and make use of them. If our income is lost, we’ll not be long for Lane End Cottage in any case.’

  Sarah and Ada crept around for most of that day, in such pain from their frenzy of work that Sarah was hard pressed to believe they would ever be well enough to undertake more.

  ‘I’d best go and fetch the key from Martha,’ Sarah said, as the afternoon drew to a close. ‘She’ll be wondering what’s become of us.’ But that day and the next slipped by in helping Ada and attending to neglected household chores and it was Wednesday before Sarah felt sufficiently recovered to head down the road into Northwaite.

  ‘I’ll deliver these remedies,’ she said, tying on her bonnet. ‘And then I’ll pick up the key from Martha.’

  Ada was going to keep an eye on Alice and Sarah felt quite sure that she would be taking advantage of Alice’s nap-time to have a sleep herself. She hadn’t regained her energy as Sarah had; she would have to insist that the working party was reduced to two for the coming weekend. She and Daniel could carry on, while Ada could stay with Martha and help her mind Alice.

  Her mind busy with such thoughts, it took her a moment or two to recognise that there was no one home at Martha’s house. She knocked at the back and front doors but the house had a silent, unoccupied feel about it. Thinking that Martha must have gone to Wednesday market in Nortonstall, Sarah was turning for home when a movement in the window of Lane End Cottage caught her eye. Puzzled she peered in at the front window, shielding her eyes against the reflections cast by the bright sunlight. There was definitely movement in the dim interior but it was hard to make out what was happening until her eyes adjusted to the gloom within. Martha, her hair bound up in a scarf, was in the front parlour with another couple of women from the village, industriously applying limewash to the walls.

  Sarah rapped on the window to gain their attention and Martha jumped, then laid down her brush and came to the door.

  ‘You weren’t meant to find us here,’ she said. She was flushed; whether from the hard work or embarrassment, Sarah couldn’t be sure. ‘We wanted it to be a surprise. You worked so hard over the weekend – I knew you must both be exhausted. Fanny and Agnes here –’ she indicated the two women, whom Sarah now recognised as having children recently helped by Ada’s remedies ‘– wanted to help you out after all that Ada has done for the village over the years. And you’ve done such a good job of cleaning that the limewash is going on a treat.’

  It didn’t take Sarah long to discover that they were now working on the final room, having worked in teams since Monday. She was overcome and could barely thank them, choked as she was by tears.

  ‘You’re to think nothing of it,’ Martha said firmly. ‘Nor must you think of coming to help. You have enough to do with the packing up and care of Alice. I didn’t tell you because I thought you might just forbid it. The men are coming in over the weekend to finish off the garden and you’ll be able to settle yourselves in after that.’

  Chapter 34

  After several days’ hard labour packing up their home, Sarah had cause to be grateful all over again to Martha for her kindness in preparing Lane End Cottage. They arrived in their new home on the Wednesday, a week on from Sarah’s last visit, the carter having set aside the morning in order to make several trips. Ada’s boxes of bottles, jars, herbs and books made up one complete load and Sarah had given up the task of trying to persuade her grandmother to throw things away, reasoning that this might be best achieved once they were unpacking in the new place.

  They’d arrived to find that Martha had been true to her word and the work that Daniel had begun on the garden had been finished, front and back. An area of rather scrubby lawn, complete with apple tree, had been revealed at the bottom of the back garden, but otherwise all was pristine earth, ready for planting.

  The limewash had transfor
med the cottage interior, so that all was now bright instead of dingy, and Martha had thoughtfully placed flowers picked from her garden in the parlour and kitchen. Their moving-in day brought with it the blessing of further good weather, so not only were their household effects kept dry throughout their transportation, but the new cottage seemed filled with light as soon as they stepped through the door.

  Ada had been particularly morose as she said goodbye to Hill Farm Cottage, her home for so many years. She had walked from room to room as their possessions were emptied out, then taken refuge in the garden, leaving Sarah to direct the operations. Sarah herself had expected to feel sadness, but the trials of organising the loads meant that, by the time she came to take one last look around the place, it felt as though it had been robbed of its memories. They had vanished along with the furniture and ornaments that had turned the place into a home.

  She had, though, made a point of going out into the garden to say goodbye to the robin, keeping crumbs aside from breakfast for the purpose. Although she feared her friend might be busy with a nest and youngsters, the crumbs brought it down from the ivy.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said, watching its quick, wary movements as it caught up the crumbs. ‘We have to leave and are sorry to do so. We hope the new residents will watch over you.’

  Ada had been very quiet as they walked down to Lane End Cottage, following the carter with his last load. When she saw the garden all cleared and ready for planting she brightened, however. And she was speechless when she walked into the cottage. Sarah hadn’t elaborated on how much had been achieved by Martha and the other villagers, simply saying that a few of them were lending a hand and preferring to leave the extent of the transformations as a surprise.

  ‘It’s hard to believe that this is the same place that we left only ten days ago,’ Ada exclaimed. ‘How well everything looks here!’

  Martha had been busy directing helpers where to put the furniture as it arrived on the cart so that the cottage was already beginning to look much more like home. Ada explored it from top to bottom and came downstairs smiling. She took Alice out into the garden and Sarah heard her grandmother describing to her great-granddaughter where the herb beds would be planted and how the fruit-tree would give them shade and how perfect the grass would be for her to run about.