by Betty Burton
Mary had faults. If anybody knew, then Lotte did. But twenty years ago she had made her way across country to Bristol, then gone on and on searching until she found Lotte. Mary had picked her up, nursed her, and worked herself into the ground at any rotten work she could get. Those years had fastened Lotte to Mary with bonds of gratitude, but not affection. It was the one thing that Mary wanted above all, yet she stirred it in nobody. Mary had pushed and guided Lotte. If Lotte was a success, then so was Mary, for it was she who had seen that her pretty little sister had looks and grace that were saleable in better places than around the Bristol dockside. It was she that had protected her from any more Tomas Nugents.
Loyalty, duty, gratitude, obligation – but no affection. Lotte had tried to love Mary as she used to when they were at Croud Cantle, but a bitter worm had bored into Mary and there was little left to love.
Right from the time Mary had gone to Bristol she had hardly said anything about Lotte’s flight with Tomas Nugent. But living close for twenty years, Lotte had come to realise that her sister’s bitterness was bound up with him. Mary had worshipped him from the time she was ten and went to work at Croud Cantle. He was fourteen. Lotte realised that it was not personal jealousy that Mary Holly felt towards Bella Estover. It was jealousy towards Tomas Nugent’s wife. She would have felt the same about any woman he had married. But she’d had her nose rubbed in it with Bella Estover coming there like that, under the guise of nursing the old man. And then getting Tomas, who was still just a lovely boy, into a trap.
Mary had been forced to watch it happen, and Lotte knew that her sister had never really got over it.
Meeting Tomas’s daughter like that had given Lotte a bit of the kind of backbone she had often wished for. It had occurred to her sometimes that she had never properly grown up as she ought. People had pushed her about for years, and she had been willing to let them. It was much better, easier, not to cross people. Especially people who wanted their own way, thought they knew best – and often did, she had to admit that – people like Harry and Mary. But meeting Tomas Nugent’s daughter had done something to help her stand up at last. She had sometimes wondered if she should have had more courage over Rosie. This time she would have to make her own decision. There was nobody else who could – for the sake of the girl.
When she arrived back at the Big House, Harry had gone off to look at his horses. There had obviously been trouble between Mary and Mrs Cutts. It was Harry’s fault, of course. He ought to have sorted out with his Housekeeper where Mary fitted in the household. Mary had been ordering Harry about for years in the various smart little houses he had provided for Lotte, and in which Mary behaved as a kind of mother/housekeeper. She had no intention of taking second place to a paid servant at Park Manor.
Mary had always taken charge of everything, but on the Sunday when Lotte decided to leave, it was Lotte who called for all their boxes and bags to be brought up. She started packing before Mary could argue her out of it. She tried, but Lotte just went on piling her belongings into trunks.
“You mean you’ll go? Now, just when you’ve got your hands on all this lot?”
“I don’t want my hands on this lot. I never wanted it. We should never have come. What do you think it’d be like for the Nugent girl, and for . . .” the name she had always avoided, “for Mrs Nugent.”
“Ah, so that’s it. You saw that girl and you’ve gone stupid and sentimental. What about Rosie? What about us?”
“We shall be all right.”
“Do you want to go back to how it used to be? You’re thirty-five, Charlotte. You’re lucky to a got away with it this long. For sakes, look at me. Forty-two, and don’t I look old enough for your mother?”
Lotte tried to divert Mary’s pique from developing into rancour with lightness.
“Goodness, Mary, don’t everybody look old enough for my mother.”
“You’ll have to tell him now. You can’t just go off and expect him to put up with it. Any case . . . ” She didn’t finish, but Lotte knew what she meant. If they didn’t know already, people would remember a name like Mary Holly. Then add Charlotte and Lotte together and make a great deal of it.
“In any case, I’ve made my mind up. I shall tell Harry what I should have told him years ago. I never told him any lies. I never made out I was ever any more than I am, but I should have told him years ago.”
Lotte had been thrusting skirts and gowns into trunks and Mary had been automatically folding and repacking. It was the first time that the older of the two sisters had felt herself at a disadvantage in any argument between them. It was as though Lotte had gone from the house a young girl and returned as a woman – the kind of woman Lotte sometimes became on stage. Lotte felt it too. She felt strong.
The door that connected her room and Harry’s opened.
“What was it you should have told me years ago, Lott?”
Summer 1788
One of mother’s savings is, “things go in threes.” “It does not seem sense that they should, but it would be interesting to see if there is any pattern to the way events happen in peoples lives. It does seem sometimes that when one thing happens other things do as well. When she says that things go in threes, she does sometimes have to bend events to make them fit.
Nevertheless, there do seem to be clusters of events that we remember. Jaen got married – I started market – I started lessons. For some while, nothing happened out of the ordinary. Then Hanna came to us – Jaen was ill – Daniel was born.
I began thinking of this because after a dull time, events are tumbling upon me.
Since I wrote a few weeks ago about reading the story of “The Vicar of Wakefield”, I have had some ideas about writing. The first is that my style of writing this journal is not much different from the facts that I record in my Common Book, and often do not read any better than a receipt for apple jelly. If people in a hundred years are to read this then it should be as interesting for them as that book was to me.
The events I have learned of in the last few days are more dramatic by far than those Mr Goldsmith records, and I shall from here on attempt to write with less formality.
Yesterday, for the second time, I met my father’s mistress.
She looks fragile, and her hair is fine and pale as the silk seed-head of a meadow thistle. Her name is Charlotte Trowell.
Although she’s a woman, fourteen years or so older than me, and she is now famous for playing in Sheridan’s plays and has appeared at theatres in London, we sat and talked as Jaen and I might.
We were on Bell Tump and she told me how Tomas Nugent loved her, and ran away with her. When she spoke of it she was looking down at the place where it happened, her look was sad and I wanted to put my arm about her, as once I did my mother. My mother was warm and soft and I felt the structure of her bones, like the soft body of a bird. I think that Mrs Trowell must be like a pink and white canary.
Hanna is the only human creature who ever puts a hand in mine or an arm about my neck, and who I can do the same to, yet there are times when it seems like holding back nature not to put arms round people, and let them do the same to me. I remember watching my mother wash Hanna’s hair and longed for the feel of her hard fingers on my scalp. When Mrs Trowell was with me, I thought what pleasure there would be to touch the fine pale hair.
Hanna is my mother’s only contact. Lately, when Hanna kisses goodnight to my mother, she will say, “Ah, you great baby”, and I think she is weaning herself from Hanna’s touch, as she did from Jaen and me.
She said that she would have jumped off Beacon Hill for him, my father, Tomas Nugent, yet he went to the milk-maid and loved her. Why? Why?
When I said to Mrs Trowell, that men would think me cold, she looked at me, then quickly away. Why? Does she see Tomas Nugent’s blood in me? Was that what Jaen got from our father, his nature? The thoughts and dreams I have!
There have been women. In the bible. Salome. Delilah. The woman saved from stoning. Perhaps I am m
y father’s daughter.
Why does my mother shrink from an embrace, even from a daughter? Why?
Jude Nugent
All the way back to the holding, Jude thought about what she should say to Bella. When she arrived, she found that there was nothing to say. What Mrs Trowell had told Jude was impossible to retell. She could never convey what she felt about the woman. Bella would not understand how Jude could have any warm feelings: to her it would be disloyalty.
Summer was slowing down, the hills were changing colour. Knapweed, cornflowers and cat’s-ear bloomed on and on and beside the tracks and raikes, pure, blue chicory flowered. Goat’s-beard seed drifted everywhere, and although children were sent out daily with baskets to take fresh dandelion heads for wine-making, they could never keep up with the ever-blooming gold.
This year, the raspberries and other soft fruit had come in abundance, so Bella took on two girls to help with the making of preserves, jellies and cordials.
Fred Warren was getting busy again and had not come by their stall on the market morning following the Bell Tump episode. Jude was going round shopping for a few things before the market was over and called into Fred’s small office in the grain merchant’s yard to return his book.
“Did you know Ophelia has gone?”
Jude was taken aback.
“No!”
“I haven’t been up to the House. It was the tenant at Mill Farm. He said that Young Harry had gone off again.”
Whilst he was telling Jude, he was watching her closely.
“What else did he say, Fred?”
“Nothing very much.”
“Oh Fred, I can see it in your face that he did.”
“No. He started to say something, but I can never stand his gossip. I wouldn’t stay to give him the satisfaction.”
“Have you heard anything at the market today?”
“No.”
“You will. It is nothing for us to be ashamed of, but they will all make something of it.”
Suddenly, not knowing why, tears sprang to Jude’s eyes.
“The one who should be hurt is dead and gone, but it is Mother and her they will tear at. Oh, the devil with tears!” She blotted her eyes with her cuffs. “My eyes always show so red.”
“Judeth,” he said gently. Then, in an attempt to hide his concern, put an arm lightly about her shoulders and said, “Do you want to tell me, Judeth?”
“My father . . . Mrs Trowell . . . She was his other wife.”
His warmth and firm arm about her, the wholesome smell of grain in his clothes, and the concern in his voice, made her tears flow faster. He drew her closer and she cried on to his waistcoat breast. It was a marvellous relief.
Coupled with the relief, guilt. Confusion. At twenty, this was the first time a man had held her close and she liked the sensation. Oh, the many sermons on the sins of the flesh. The years living with her untouchable mother. Having no body, save Hanna’s, close to her own since Jaen went from home. Fred Warren was like a relative. To be held by Fred and to enjoy the sensation was a gross sin of the flesh.
Anyone coming into the office at that moment and seeing the two, might have read into the scene something other than tutor-pupil relationship.
As did Will Vickery, glimpsing it for a few seconds before he hastily closed the door again.
The Park Manor story was a nine-day-wonder. Its details were altered and twisted out of recognition, and the fact that the Goodenstone name was involved added spice and malice to the gossip. Bella and Jude took Hanna to visit her parents. In Newton Clare, the story was that one of Harry Goodenstone’s dairymaids had run off with a farmer, and he had got her back and set her up in the Big House.
Bella said that it was Jaen’s right to know and, in a brusque manner, told her the bare bones of the history. At twenty-six, Jaen was a matron. Pregnancy, birth, still-birth, child-death, miscarriage. Her moods changed abruptly from tears to fury, and there were times when she found herself holding a dish and not knowing what on earth she intended doing with it.
When Bella finished, all that Jaen said was: “He had a velvet coat. I always remembered his coat.”
Life at Park Manor and the management of its farms went on as it had always done during the owner’s absence, ordered by housekeeper, agent, manager and solicitor. Only the solicitor knew where to contact Harry Goodenstone. On the Sunday evening, after Lotte returned from Winchester Hill, there had been a flurry of packing. In the morning, Mary Holly and Mrs Trowell had been driven away, soon followed by the master of Park Manor. There was a great deal of speculation, but it was not until the next day that anybody knew what was behind it.
Sublimated, contorted passion. Mary Holly would not leave without punishing the woman who tricked Tomas into marrying her. It was her fault that Lotte and Mary were not now in possession of Croud Cantle. There would have been none of that time in Bristol; no secret ready to jump out and spoil everything, if Bella Estover hadn’t got herself pregnant and tricked her Master into marrying her. Well, now it didn’t matter and Bella Estover would get everything she deserved.
It was Mrs Cutts who had the story from Mary. Mrs Cutts, with secrets and poverty of her own to hide. Mary could not have chosen a more suitable confidante, or one who was better at putting down her own kind: it distanced her from them.
In the weeks that followed, Jude worked herself into the ground. Long after Bella and Hanna had gone to bed, she was working. The hours she usually spent reading or writing, she spent on any physical work she could find – whitening walls, tarring beams or oiling woodwork. It was only when she was dead tired that she could fall into an oblivious sleep. If she did not get to that exhausted stage, she would stay in a half-conscious state, where her thoughts became distorted and terrifying, her stomach knotted with obscure fear. The only way she could cope was to try to censor her mind and quell her body on a treadmill of work.
Once or twice, she fell into a trance over the bread and cheese she took with her into the fields. The experience was frightening. She remained aware of her surroundings, and realised that she was not fully conscious, but could not pull herself out of the dreams. She would waken from the state, bathed in sweat. She had a recurring dream in which, with arms and legs bound and mouth gagged, she struggled and struggled to reach an ever-retreating summit of an Old Marl which was sandy and barren; or, gasping for breath, sank eternally into Howgaite meads, whose spongy marsh had become a swamp of sucking filth. Mary Holly often appeared in the dreams, ridiculing Jude’s naked body as she stood on the steps of Blackbrook market cross, hawking blank sheets of paper. A draped angel with welcoming arms, from a picture that hung in Bella’s room, appeared to her. It turned its back, its drapes and wings fell away. Though his face was away from her, she knew that he was beautiful, as he held out his arms to Lotte Trowell. When she awoke from the trances, the smell of grain-impregnated cloth was always in her nostrils.
Seeing Jude with dark rings round her eyes, Bella prescribed licorice powder.
“I’m all right,”Jude insisted. “It’s just the weather.”
Earlier in the summer, there had been enough rainfall to swell root-crops and grain, but for weeks now the weather had been cloudless. No one could remember so many days of unbroken sun.
If the weather held, it would be a good harvest.
All over the county, rooks, clouds, gnats and midges were consulted daily for a forecast, and old people sniffed the air and reported on the state of their rheumatics. The weather held.
Every year, about this time, they took on extra hands at Croud Cantle for the digging and clamping of root-crops. This year, it seemed that there were more people than anybody could remember looking for work: not village people, but strangers from over the border of Sussex. Men who had left their families under the roof of some more fortunate neighbour, had come to look for a week’s or even a day’s work, if they could get it. People on their way to markets all over Hampshire noticed the increase in the number of men tramping
the roads in search of work. But there was no more work about in Hampshire than in Sussex.
Harvest was always a time of tension. If there was going to be a poor yield, then it was vital that the weather held, for not a grain could be afforded to go to waste. If there looked like being an abundance, it was equally important.
To the landowners and tenant farmers, harvest meant profit. A thunderstorm could spoil crops and make for scarcities, which meant that the prices would have to be raised to maintain their income. To the agricultural labourer, a thunderstorm at harvest meant not only the depressing sight of seeing a season of work flattened, but also that employers would have an excuse to push wages even further down at a time when food prices would be high.
Many a crocodile tear dampened a landowner’s cheek as he told Joby or Ned that they would all go broke over it. Wages were low and were likely to get lower. There was plenty of spare labour tramping the roads.
At Croud Cantle, the shelves were filling up with pots of sweet preserves and chutneys. Honeycombs were draining and the curds that had dripped from the gush of spring milk were turning into pale, acidic, Cantle cheese. Apples were laid out in the lofts and the new wine was clearing. Each evening Bella took Hanna to look at their stock, refreshing herself at the sight of their security for the coming year; Hanna smiling, pleased at the result of her part in the picking and pounding and stirring.
“Well now, lovey, there’s a sight!”
Bella fluctuated in her opinion about Hanna’s lack of interest in learning to read. Much of the time her reactions depended on whether Jude was trying to coax Hanna into learning or not. If she found Hanna chalking letters on a slate, she would comment that all anybody ever needed to know was how many beans made five. She was pleased that Hanna was turning out to be a good, practical worker. Bella understood Hanna.