The Innkeeper's Daughter

by Val Wood

  ‘I don’t want to, Father. I want to go to King’s and study medicine.’

  His father rose from the table. ‘I won’t discuss it now and you’re ruining my breakfast.’

  Jamie sat a little longer after his father had left the room and then got up and lifted the lids of the dishes on the sideboard. Such a lot of food, he thought, and half of it will go for pigswill. He forked up two bacon rashers and some kidneys and a slice of toast and sat down to eat.

  I won’t give in, he determined. Just because Father followed his father into farming, there’s no reason why I should; it would be different if I were the only son, but Felix wants to be a landowner and I do not. He crunched aggressively on a crisp rasher. And I won’t.

  Jamie didn’t think that his brother was as keen on farming as he was on basking in the prestige and standing in the community that being a landowner could bring. He knew that Felix expected their workers to doff their caps to him and to be addressed as Master Felix as was right and proper, whereas Jamie was embarrassed by it, particularly because as a child he had played in the meadows or on the sands with several of the tenant farmers’ sons who were now themselves employed by his father.

  I’m out of step, I know, he thought. I want the best of both worlds. I want to be part of the community, yet I don’t want to be poor and beholden to people like my family. My mother always told us, Felix and me, that we were no better than anyone else, just more fortunate, and that we should always remember that. It was surprising, he thought, that his mother, who was born into a much grander Yorkshire family than his father’s and was considered to have married beneath her, had always emphasized that it was purely an accident of birth that put them where they were.

  If you are fortunate enough through that accidental occurrence to be educated, she had said, you must learn to be compassionate and generous towards those who have not had that same good fortune. Her words had made an early impression on the young Jamie, yet he recalled how Felix had narrowed his eyes and chewed on his lips and decided that the advantage of his birth had given him superiority and he would follow his own pre-eminent course.

  He was just finishing a second cup of coffee when Felix came into the breakfast room.

  ‘Ah, you’re here at last, are you?’ his brother said. He brushed back his fair tousled hair with his long fingers. ‘We were beginning to think you’d decided to stay in Hull.’ Felix opened the lid of a dish, looked in and then closed it again. He picked up the jug of coffee and poured himself a cup.

  ‘No,’ Jamie said. ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘More exciting pastimes in Hull than out in Holderness! Theatres, concert halls, drinking saloons.’ Felix sat down and stretched out his legs. ‘Women,’ he added. ‘Don’t tell Father or our sisters, but I wouldn’t mind going myself, except that I haven’t got the time, of course, not like you, little brother.’

  Jamie rose to the bait as he always did. ‘I’m not in Hull purely for pleasure, as you very well know. I’m there to study.’

  ‘And you’ll soon be done with all that, won’t you,’ Felix continued lazily, ‘and be coming to join us, Father and me; coming to get some Holderness soil under your fingernails instead of ink.’

  Jamie laughed. ‘If I saw dirt beneath your fingernails it would be for the first time! If I thought for one moment there’d be a chance of getting my hands dirty I just might want to join the family business. As it is, I’d rather not. You know that I want to go to university. You don’t honestly want me to interfere with your chosen role of being master when Father retires?’

  Felix shrugged. ‘Please yourself. I don’t care one way or another. But you do realize that Father will cut you off if you don’t join us and I certainly won’t help you out if it all comes to me.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you will,’ Jamie said slowly. ‘And what about Frances and Mary? Will you help them out?’

  ‘Father will make sure they’re all right,’ Felix said. ‘He’ll leave them a legacy, and anyway they’ll find husbands to support them.’

  ‘They might not,’ Jamie argued. ‘They might not find anyone that Father approves of and then eventually you’ll be responsible for them.’

  Poor things, he thought gloomily. They’ll be stuck here with Felix, and if he should marry they’ll have no status at all and be confined to some small corner of the estate, in the gamekeeper’s cottage or somewhere.

  Felix gave a wicked grin. ‘Oh, I’ll foist them on to you, don’t worry about that. They’d prefer that in any case. I don’t think they like me very much.’

  Jamie rose from the table. ‘I’m going out,’ he said. ‘I’m going down to the sands to give Bonny a gallop. When I come back is there anything you’d like me to do?’

  ‘Possibly,’ his brother murmured. ‘I’ll think of something. There’s a fence down in one of the paddocks; you could make sure Hutton does it properly.’

  Jamie laughed. ‘He’s more likely to know what to do than I am,’ he said, thinking of the handyman. ‘What about paperwork or something, do you need help with that?’

  ‘Father likes to do it himself,’ Felix said. ‘He thinks I haven’t a head for figures. Which I haven’t if I’m honest, but I need to know which farm is making money and which isn’t. But he won’t let me near the accounts.’

  ‘And doesn’t he talk about it?’ Jamie asked incredulously. ‘Do you think we’re short of money?’

  ‘Good heavens, no,’ Felix said heartily. ‘He just likes to play his cards close to his chest. I suppose he’ll tell when he’s ready. Tell me at any rate; if you persist in this crazy idea of going to university, then he’s not likely to tell you anything, is he?’

  Jamie pondered on this as he thundered along the sands on Bonny’s back. He kept the mare to the water’s edge as he saw that there had been a few fresh falls since his last visit. The clay cliffs here were notoriously dangerous, especially after rain, when without any warning they would crumble and slide, falling in great jagged heaps on to the sands below.

  Is Father short of money, he wondered? Is the estate not doing as well as it once was? And is that why he was so annoyed about the mention of my applying for an exhibition? The majority of their money, he knew, had come from his mother when she and his father had married. His father had been a farmer and a relatively rich one, but not well heeled enough to purchase such a spread as the old manor house and the land that went with it. His mother had loved the place, loved the sound of the sea, which they could hear from the house as it crashed against the cliffs, and the wide skies which showed such glorious sunrises and sunsets.

  Perhaps the estate won’t keep us all, he thought; and that should be reason enough for me to take up a profession, so why is Father so dead set against it? Is it his pride that is telling him that both his sons should carry out the running of the estate, or – a thought struck him – does he think that Felix is not capable of one day running it alone? Which is ridiculous, he thought as he slowed Bonny to a canter, because it will be years before Father needs to give up the reins and by then Felix will be experienced in all matters of farm and land management.

  The Lucan Grange estate had two thousand acres. Four farms were tenanted; two of them were arable with four hundred acres each, one with three hundred acres kept dairy cattle and a few bullocks for fattening, and the fourth was a mixed farm with two hundred acres. The remaining acreage was farmed by the Lucans and mainly put down to a rotation of wheat and barley, beans or oats, with some livestock for their own home needs.

  Jamie’s conscience began to prick at the idea of being out on the sands exercising his horse when he should be back at home helping out, but as he turned and rode back along the empty sands and then took the path across the rime-frosted fields he bethought himself that if he offered any practical help he would be taking work away from the men and Felix had said their father wouldn’t allow anyone else to assist him with the accounts. So what could he do?

  In November, the month of the Hiring Fa
irs, farmers chose their workers for the following year. The Lucans kept on their regular staff, but the tenanted farms mostly drew on the Hiring Fairs to employ their labour. Jamie didn’t like the idea of it at all; he thought it demeaning for anyone to stand in line in a market square, often in cold and wet weather, and wait to be chosen, to be looked over and assessed. Surely, he thought, a man or woman’s reputation – for there were often women looking for employment as scullery or dairy maids – should speak for them.

  But there we are, he mused as he cantered towards Lucan Grange, I’m out of step again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BELLA WOKE EARLY on Christmas morning and decided that she would get up even though it was only half past five and still dark. She would stoke the fire to heat the oven, and as soon as it was hot enough would put in the goose which was waiting ready dressed in the cold larder.

  It had been a merry time in the inn on Christmas Eve, for apart from the regular customers many other village people had arrived, pleased that the Christmas tradition of pork pies, frumatty and syllabub was continuing at the Woodman in spite of Joseph Thorp’s death. The carol singers, wassailing their way from house to house around the village, also called in, and everyone gave voice to Christmas hymns and carols.

  At the very last minute Sarah, who had spent most of the early evening in the kitchen, had bestirred herself to bake several Yorkshire cheesecakes and brought them into the taproom herself as soon as they were out of the oven. They were golden and creamy and bursting with moist fruit and the plate was soon emptied. The food traditionally was free but beer and gin and spiced punch were eagerly quaffed and they had a profitable evening.

  ‘There’s nobody can mek chiskeeak like Sarah Thorp,’ one village man had declared. ‘Even though she’s an incomer.’

  Sarah, dressed in her mourning black, had gone pink at his compliment, but then had frowned slightly at his suggestion that she wasn’t a true Holdernessian and sixteen years at the Woodman didn’t count for anything.

  ‘I’m not like all of you,’ she’d said to the family as they were clearing up after the inn had closed. ‘You’re born and bred here, but I’m still regarded as a Hull woman.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Ma,’ William had assured her. ‘It’s who you are that’s important, not where you’re from.’

  ‘Listen to him,’ Joe sneered. ‘Words of wisdom from ’lad.’

  ‘But it’s true,’ Bella said defensively. ‘And everybody knows Ma’s from Hull but accepts her here in Holderness. And anyway,’ she added, ‘there’s nothing wrong with coming from Hull.’

  Her mother sighed. ‘There isn’t,’ she’d said. ‘It’s a fine town, so don’t you go knocking it, Joe. You’ve never even been.’

  ‘Me! I never did,’ Joe had protested. ‘What did I say?’

  Joe and William slept late on Christmas morning and so would Nell have done, except that Bella woke her up to set the breakfast table and help scrub the root vegetables for dinner. She brought her mother a cup of tea and then took Henry out of his cot and gave him to Sarah to feed.

  ‘He’s doing well, isn’t he, Ma?’ she said, sitting on the end of the bed. ‘He’s really taking notice of everything.’ She smiled indulgently. ‘His first Christmas. He’s lovely. Such a bonny bairn.’

  Her mother nodded, and as Henry latched himself on to her breast his eyes seemed to turn in the direction of Bella’s voice.

  ‘He’s watching out for you,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s tekken a fancy to you all right. I reckon he thinks you’re his ma.’

  Bella reached over and gently stroked the child’s head of dark hair.

  ‘As long as folks don’t think he’s mine,’ she said softly. ‘I saw Mrs Ward one day when I’d taken Henry out for an airing – you know, she lives over Preston way. I expect she was visiting her aunt, who lives at ’other end of ’village; she’d just got off ’carrier’s cart anyway, and she saw me with Henry and came across specially to take a look at him and ask me whose bairn he was. She was quite sharp until I told her he was my brother and then she sort of sniffed up her nose and said she hadn’t heard that you’d had a bairn.’

  ‘What did you say?’ her mother asked mildly.

  Bella blushed. ‘I was a bit rude, I suppose; I asked her if mebbe she hadn’t heard that my father had died either, and that was why you weren’t out with him as you were still in mourning. She went red and muttered something and hurried off.’

  ‘There’s allus somebody ready to pull somebody else down, Bella,’ her mother said. ‘Best to ignore them.’

  But downstairs frying bacon and sausage for breakfast, Bella remembered that Mr Lucan had asked the same question. He looked surprised when I went in with Henry that first time; no, not surprised, she thought; startled. He looked as if he’d never expected to see a baby here and he came over and asked me whose bairn it was. Child, he’d said. Not bairn. I don’t suppose he ever says bairn. He’s different from us.

  She wondered what kind of Christmas Day he would be having with his family. Her thoughts grew fanciful. Would they have goose like them, and who would cook it? Not his mother. I suppose they’ll have a cook and maybe other servants to carry in the food, and then her mind took her to her friend Alice and she wondered how she was getting on in her job as a skivvy, and if she would be home for Christmas. I must walk down into the village sometime, she thought, and ask her ma, and maybe take Henry with me.

  The goose was cooked to perfection, as was the Christmas pudding, but they were all fairly subdued, with occasional forced jollity, each with their own thoughts of Joseph.

  ‘Father would have enjoyed this, wouldn’t he, Ma?’ Bella said quietly, not wanting to avoid mentioning their father’s absence, and needing to reassure her mother that he was in their thoughts.

  ‘Aye, he would,’ Sarah said. ‘He allus liked his Christmas dinner, though he didn’t like shutting up ’inn on Christmas Day. He’d have opened up if he could.’

  ‘Shall we open a bottle o’ sherry or port to drink a toast to him?’ Joe asked.

  ‘What good’ll that do?’ his mother said sharply. ‘No, you’ll have to be satisfied wi’ brandy in ’pudding. Can’t go drinking away ’profit. If you want a drink have some ale, or water,’ she added.

  William shook his head and said he didn’t want anything. He wasn’t a drinker, unlike Joe who had a tankard of ale most days, and, Bella suspected, often more than one when there was no one else around. She had once tackled him about it, but he had blusteringly told her that customers often bought him a glass of ale and he had to be sociable.

  Joe got up from the table. ‘So nobody else wants to drink a toast to our da?’ he said grudgingly. ‘Am I ’onny one?’

  ‘I’ll have a glass of lemonade,’ Bella said, and Nell joined in and said that she would too, but their mother and William declined.

  And so the day passed, slightly uneasily, with Joe and William stretched out and dozing in front of the fire, and Nell humming to herself and trying on the woollen mittens which her mother had knitted, and casually looking at a book that Bella had given her. Bella and her mother cleared away the dirty crockery, pots and pans, and then they too sat and dozed in the warmth of the kitchen with Henry sleeping in his cot.

  At Lucan Grange, the midday meal on Christmas Day was also long and rather tense. Roger Lucan and his sons had dressed for the occasion in dark jackets and trousers with white shirts and cravats, and his two young daughters were dressed in white muslin with pink and blue ribbons threaded through the hems and necklines of their ankle-length dresses. One of the maids had helped them dress and put a pink ribbon in Frances’s hair and in Mary’s a sprig of holly.

  Both girls were excited about Christmas; the memory of their mother was slowly fading, and although they often said they would never forget their darling Mama there were parcels waiting to be opened which required more immediate attention.

  Christmas luncheon was brought in by Mrs Greenwood and one other maid. The housekeeper
had informed Mr Lucan some weeks before that she would like to give some of the staff the day off.

  ‘I’ve nowhere else to go,’ she’d told him. ‘This is my home until I’m no longer needed here, but two of ’younger maids have families to return to and I think they should spend Christmas Day with them.’

  She said it so firmly that Roger Lucan gave one of his occasional smiles and said he wouldn’t dream of interfering with her plans, as long as life at the Grange ran with its usual efficiency.

  ‘You won’t even notice ’difference, Mr Lucan,’ she said mildly. ‘I only considered it right that you should be informed.’

  She had served them potted chicken liver, then a sliver of smoked salmon on brown bread, followed by the main dish of roast goose with gooseberry sauce and a savoury stuffing, one of the cook’s specialities; a haunch of venison, pork sausage from one of their own pigs and a variety of vegetables from the kitchen garden, gathered before the frost. When they had finished she carried in the Christmas pudding, a blue flame blazing from the burning brandy, with the maid coming behind with a jug of brandy sauce.

  ‘I’ve left a cheese board and biscuits on ’dresser, sir,’ she said before leaving them to their dessert. ‘And there’s a jug of coffee keeping warm.’

  Roger Lucan waved her away. ‘Thank you, Mrs Greenwood. Now off you go and have your luncheon. We can manage perfectly well, and my compliments to Cook,’ he added. ‘She has excelled herself once again.’ He reached across the table to where there was a full bottle of red wine. ‘Here, take this for your luncheon. You and Cook deserve a treat.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Mrs Greenwood gave a little bob of her knee. ‘I hope you enjoy ’rest of ’day. Ring if you need me.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Greenwood,’ Jamie said, and looked pointedly at his sisters, who chanted in unison, ‘Yes, thank you, Mrs Greenwood.’ ‘And a happy Christmas,’ Mary added, whilst Felix nodded in agreement.

  When they had finished their coffee, they all adjourned to the drawing room, leaving the remnants of their meal on the table for Mrs Greenwood and the maid to clear away later.