by Betty Burton
She had an affection for Harry. He had been generous, but for all his, “One day we shall commit matrimony, Lott,” she realised that most of his passion centred around the other people she could become; the unreal ones, the fantasies she created for him as he watched her on the stage. One day he would not find in his bed the tragic princess he had seen die, or the little royal prince in doublet and hose that he had seen strutting in a make-believe world earlier that evening. He would find Charlotte Holly, the milkmaid who ran away to sea with her master.
She remembered Winchester Hill as a frightening place, not that she could recall ever having climbed it. There was never any reason to. Now that she was here, it appeared to be a good place to be. On the crest she came across the ruins, then climbed further down to a pile of stones. Once it had supported the wall of a dwelling of some sort on the left breast of Winchester, not far from the giant’s hat of Bell Tump.
All that she could see of Park Manor from here were the cedar trees. She could pick out the pond and the church – she remembered them – and there, diagonally across, deep under the Tradden Raike, was the Nugent Farm. It looked very small.
From her seat on the stones, Lotte saw a movement a short distance down the slope. A woman, who had been sitting in a hollow behind a mount, sat up suddenly. Immediately Lotte recognised Tomas Nugent’s daughter.
She realised that neither of them could move without the other seeing, so that there was bound to be another meeting. If it had not been for the strange relationship they had, Lotte would have taken to his daughter. She was one for first impressions, and she had liked the girl. Although she was superficially like Tomas’s wife, as Lotte remembered her, Tomas’s striking handsomeness had come through. Yet, judging from when she had seen her at Harry’s house, Lotte felt sure that the girl wasn’t aware of the impression her looks made on people. And she wasn’t really still a girl. She must be twenty now, same age as Rosie.
The first part of that afternoon at Harry’s Lotte had felt sure that the girl hadn’t known that she was her father’s . . . Lotte wondered how the girl had thought of her all these years, what word the mother had used when talking about her – trollop? harlot? Those were the kind of words Cantle people would use. She was sure the girl had not known that Charlotte Trowell was her father’s wench. At some point Jude had clearly come to realise it, yet had behaved as though she had learned her manners in Bath society.
Lotte carried in her mind a list of irrevocable hurts she had done to people. Prime among them was what she had done to the baby that Tomas’s wife had been expecting. Not straightaway, when she had gone off with Tomas, but in later years when she thought about the little one growing up, shut away in Cantle, knowing that her father had gone off with a girl hired to milk the cows. She had tried to talk to Mary about it once, but Mary was always so bitter about Tomas’s wife that it was impossible to get any sense out of her.
“What you worrying about them for? They’m living off the fat of the land that should have been ourn.”
Mary would never have admitted it, but Lotte was sure that her sister had loved Tomas and was resentful when he married. It would not have mattered who Tomas Nugent had married, Mary would have hated his wife. What Lotte had done had just served Bella right.
Over the years, Lotte had withstood a good many knocks. She was tough. There wasn’t anybody around; the girl could say what she liked. Lotte knew she deserved whatever she had coming from her.
Lotte rose, clearing her throat and rustling her dress to allow the girl to know that she was not alone. She walked the few yards that had been separating them.
“I never was up here before,” she said.
“It’s not my favourite bit, but I come here sometimes to get a different look at Cantle. On our side you are always looking across to here.”
There was a brief silence.
“I was in Cantle before. You knew that?”
“Yes,” Jude said.
There was a longer silence between them. Eventually Lotte said: “I’m sorry. I can’t say no more than I’m sorry.”
Lotte was standing and Jude had not risen. She looked up at the older woman.
“You got nothing to be sorry about to me,” she said.
Lotte did not know how to react to the girl. She was years older, she had faced audiences in men’s costume; spoken with lords and generals. Yet in this situation, with Tomas’s daughter, she felt inadequate. It was the guilt. The baby Mary had suspected, the baby that she had thought of over the years was this quiet girl with the features and hair of her mother, but the good looks of her father.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Jude said.
The two sat looking across the valley in silence for a timeless minute.
“It’s all so bare.”
What a strange thing to say, Jude thought. It was the opposite of bare. Except on the raikes and tracks where the chalk showed through, every inch of the down was prolific: from minute mosses to junipers, from ants to hares, from moths to sparrow-hawks.
Another short silence, until Jude said: “What made you say you was sorry?”
“Because I am. I’ve always been sorry. No that’s not true. I got sorry after I realised what I had done, when I grew up a bit, when I began to think about you growing up. Village people have a nasty streak in them when it comes to that kind of thing.”
“I never knew anything about my father, nor you, till a few days ago. I knew he went off and his ship got sunk and everybody was lost.”
“It don’t seem possible you could grow up down there and never hear something like that.”
“People knew my father went off and was drowned, but they never knew you went with him. My mother says she told people that your sister and you had gone back to Rathley because of some trouble in your family. Just after there was smallpox there and nobody thought any more about it. She said nobody thought anything about two girls going off home and not coming back.”
“Wasn’t there anybody at your place who . . .?” There was no way of saying, was there nobody who knew your father had seduced me and taken me off to Bristol with him.
“No.”
Jude picked a daisy from the mound, inspected it closely, not seeing it. Apart from Hanna, this was the first time that she had ever sat with anyone on the hills since Jaen. It was very strange that she should feel at ease.
“Do you mind if I ask you?”
“What about?”
“My father was drowned and you wasn’t. My mother thought you must have gone with him. She knew where he was going off to.”
“I should have gone with him.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Lotte frowned and looked across the valley in the direction of Croud Cantle, then turned to look directly at Jude.
“It’s all a mess. It was so, right from the start.” She shook her head at the memory of the mess. “Is it all right if I call you Judeth?”
“Mostly I’m called Jude.”
“I think you’m more a Judeth.”
Jude noticed that Mrs Trowell did not know how to take her. She spoke fairly correctly and with only a little of the Hampshire about her, but from time to time the old village style crept in. Jude had noticed that in herself. The kind of words she read crept into speaking, and her mother often made a joke about Jude having got on her Winchester-city voice. Not that Jude spoke in the society way that Mrs Trowell did.
“I don’t want to upset you, nor anybody. If it had not been for Harry, I would never have stepped foot near the place again. But Harry has been good to me. You can say that – he’s been good.”
“It won’t upset me if you tell me about my father. I never knew anything. Jaen said all she could remember was his blue velvet coat, and I grew up knowing he was drowned, most likely before I was even born.”
Oh dear Lord! Lotte Trowell was suddenly aware that there were implications of her returning to Cantle that she had never even guessed at. She had thought all along it would be a mist
ake, but somehow, in the back of her mind, she had imagined that Tomas’s farm must have disappeared along with Tomas. Because it had all happened twenty years ago, it seemed almost as though it had never happened at all. And now she had dragged the mess of the past twenty years back into the valley, just because she felt she owed something to Harry Goodenstone. All that she could do now was to tell the girl some of it, if only because she was entitled to know.
“I’ve been all over the place, and I haven’t ever seen a more beautiful man than Tomas Nugent.”
“That’s a funny thing to say – beautiful. It is what my mother said when she told me about him. It’s not a word you usually hear given to men.”
“No. Yet there isn’t anything else that says it. I always thought he was beautiful. But then I was very young.”
Jude said nothing, hoping that Mrs Trowell would go on.
“When Mary took me over to Croud Cantle, your mother was working the place herself. She had the new baby.”
“Jaen. She’s married.”
“Ah yes, little Jaen. It was quite a decent place, though Mrs Nugent worked us hard. That was what was wrong with Mary. It wasn’t the being worked hard, it was being told by Mrs Nugent. Then one day Tomas – Mr Nugent as he was to us – turned up out of the blue. Everybody was talking about him, saying that things would look up. They reckoned he would be buying more stock and that kind of thing.
“Well, you don’t want the details. He came down to the meads one morning when I was there, and he spoke to me about what cows was giving up best, and just said something about . . . I’m sorry . . . he said a thing about the sort of wife he had. Ah, Judeth, when I look back now and have heard that old story a hundred times since, I could sometimes cry to think what a silly child I was.”
She turned a wry smile on Jude. “I dare say you know plenty of married men who have told you sad stories about their wives being so cold.”
“I don’t think they’d say it to me. They would think I am the one who is cold.”
Jude had scarcely allowed herself to think about this, let alone say anything. Yet suddenly the belief formed itself in her mind and she had said it to her father’s mistress.
Lotte made no comment. She knew what Jude was like, even if Jude had not realised it herself.
“There was one or two of the herd that would stand quiet on the meads and be milked. When I was there on my own he would come and talk to me. He told me about going to other countries, about things he had seen, and I thought it was all so exciting. Him being the master, and so – beautiful, coming down to talk to me while I worked. That’s what makes me so surprised. You say nobody guessed that I had gone off with him. I’d have thought he must have been seen, and there’d have been gossip. He came several times.”
From Bell Tump, Lotte could look across at the corner of the field by Howgaite Path where Tomas led her; where he had asked to be comforted by her; where her virgin body had been shaken by the unexpected explosion of ecstasy as she had looked up into that beautiful face.
In later years, she had always admitted to herself that it was not only because Tomas Nugent had said that he could not live without her, but because she wanted to repeat that experience with him.
“We went to Bristol. He said he was going back into his old business. I didn’t know anything about that: only that it meant going in a ship and sailing to hot countries like he had told me of, and I’d have gone with him to the end of the earth.”
. . . If he’d a said jump off Beacon Hill, I’d a done it . . .
“Yet you didn’t.”
“No. I stayed behind.”
On Bell Tump: plucking at grass and daisies; sitting like sisters or friends under the blue bowl that the chalk-hill gods upturned over Cantle on hot July afternoons; Jude listened to the woman who had run off with her father and learned a bit more about him. He was a man who could cast a spell on women.
The sun that had been almost overhead when Jude started to climb Winchester Hill was now shining over her left shoulder, sliding towards late afternoon. Lotte thought that she had said enough.
“I told Harry I would be back to take tea with him. I couldn’t abide being there. It all seemed on top of me. It was the coming back. The shock the other day – seeing you and realising that things and people I had thought about as though they was stories wasn’t just that. They was true. I wanted to get away from Harry for an hour, so that I could try to sort it out.”
“Have you?”
“There wasn’t anything to sort out. I can see that, now I’m up here. I wonder why I ever thought it a frightening place.”
“I’m surprised you think it bare.”
Lotte Trowell rose and brushed grass from her pink, rose-budded skirt.
“You have very pretty clothes.”Jude said.
“Harry buys them, so he chooses. He’s going to have to realise soon – women my age don’t go in for rosebuds.”
“I think they suit you.” Coming from Jude, no side, no flattery.
“That’s a compliment that means something,” said Lotte.
Lotte Trowell knew that she had made a mistake as soon as she gave in to Harry’s pleas that she give the old house, “At least a bit of a try, dammit, Lott.”
She knew that she should have told him years ago: the first time he had said his name and she had realised that he must be Old Sir Henry’s son. But by then she had obliterated the Cantle episode: Tomas Nugent had gone; Charlotte Holly, the milkmaid, was gone for ever; and the actress, Charlotte Trowell, was well-known, with a bit of money, and never in want of a part. There were always plays being produced in which a naughty, pretty, country wife, coming into society for the first time, was pursued in and out of rooms and cupboards by sophisticated philanderers and a greybeard of a husband. Mrs Trowell’s Ophelia was a delight, and gave her entrée into many famous salons in Bath and London. She could also give a good performance as a strutting young attendant or messenger in tabard and hose.
She should have told Harry years ago. When he said his name she should have smiled archly and said in her role of pretty farm wife: “Well then, Sir, you must know that I be the notorious Charlotte Holly, what ran away from Cantle with her Master.” But she never supposed, at that time, that she would ever become beholden to Harry Goodenstone, or ever need to go near Cantle again. In any case, it was nobody’s business but her own. She’d paid for it over and over.
Later on, the right moment never seemed to present itself, until eventually it was impossible to say anything at all. When he had pressed her to, “Give it a try, dammit”, she persuaded herself that it was all so long ago, nobody would remember. So it might have been, had Mary not wanted to make Bella Nugent suffer, and had not Charlotte Trowell herself still looked so much like the milkmaid who had run off with the master of Croud Cantle. The man at Willow Farm had recognised her.
The whole of that part of Hampshire was such a backwater. The nearest towns of any size were Southampton and Winchester and she had never gone there. It was just chance that she had met Harry: one of the few people from the backwater who moved in the kind of circles in which Lotte moved. It was chance also that took him one night to a theatre where she had a small part. A part in which she rushed on stage with a message for the king, her legs encased in hose that reached right up to a short bouncing tabard.
The boy-woman had brought a flush of colour to Harry Goodenstone’s cheeks, and from then on Young Harry had followed Lotte wherever she performed, with presents and propositions. Mary, who had always managed everything, had been Harry’s ally. In the end, Lotte had to admit that Mary was right. She wasn’t getting any younger, and men like him weren’t three for a farthing, and so she said, “Yes, all right, Harry”, when he offered her a kind of security as well as adoration. It was not only security for herself- there was Mary and Rosie to be provided for.
Considering what could have happened, it wasn’t all that bad.
Right from the day she found Lotte in Bristol, Ma
ry had protected her fiercely. Those had been grim and hard days. They were good milkmaids, a skill that was of no use in the part of Bristol where they were forced to live. Mary wanted for them to leave and get work on a farm, but Lotte still pined for her lover, and would not go far from where the Farmouth had sailed.
It had been months before she finally realised that he had never intended to take her with him. He said that on board the Farmouth wasn’t any place for a girl; yet it was one of the pleasures that he had held out for her in the first place, them sailing off together. Then he said it wasn’t any place for a girl in her condition, but her condition wasn’t any different whether on board a sailing ship or on the dockside at Bristol with only a couple of guineas for company.
It was meeting Jude that had decided Lotte. It was meeting Jude and liking the girl so much. Sitting with her, then realising what a queer set-up there was. The girl was Rosie’s half-sister. What did that make Lotte, but a kind of half-mother to her? Then there was Bella Nugent. Lotte didn’t reckon that the situation Tomas Nugent had landed Bella in had turned out as good as her own, as far as comfort and that was concerned. It was just as hard working that place these days, and the hours were as long as they ever were. The girl, though: Bella Nugent was lucky there. The girl said it wouldn’t upset her because it was all so long ago. Mary had said just the same thing, but they were wrong. It was all here and now.
And it was that realisation that made her determined to get out of Park Manor, out of Cantle and Hampshire altogether. Tomas Nugent had made people suffer when he was alive. If Lotte came to live at the House he would be doing it still, through her.