by Betty Burton
Finally Lotte turned to the woman and sweetly, as she always spoke, asked her if she would mind moving along. The woman was about to say something, but then drew her cloak close over her breast and quickly made good space between them.
Lotte, grieving over Mary and preoccupied of late, looked out at the world. When she stepped back into it again, she saw that it was much as it had always been and was not surprised at it. The world, looking back at Lotte, reacted as it would on finding an unsuspected slug on the underside of an open lily.
The world had reacted to Lotte’s face in this way several times in recent days, but it was only now, with a bit of respite from everything that had been going on since Mary had been stricken, that this reaction of the world registered in her conscious. She did not feel hurt or angry, but intrigued.
Well, well! What was it? Not the scar itself . . . half the population has got some mark where things has festered, teeth rotted and gum-boils has eaten into their jaws. And ringworm marks. Why, on the farm everybody had the ringworm patches on them. It wasn’t just the scar being ugly either. Good Lord, there was enough of that about, too, especially in places like Bath, where you saw men who looked like they were bloated bodies dragged from the river they were so full of fat meat and red wine – and others, women too, with poxt faces. No, the woman hadn’t drawn away from her because of that. Why, the nest of fleas the woman wore was a worse thing to sit next to than a scar. True, it was a nasty scar, especially when you compared it to the other side. That was probably it. People don’t like to have things like that jumped on them. Lotte had arranged her hair and the hood of her cloak to hide it as best she could. That wasn’t right, it caught people unawares. She had to admit she would be the same herself. If Mary had got over the smallpox, she would have had to go about with her face full of holes and pits and people wouldn’t have taken much notice. What always shocked you a bit was suddenly seeing something through a veil: an empty eye-socket where you expected to see an eye.
Then and there she decided that she could do without that kind of thing. She was going to have quite enough problems as it was, without people suddenly going quiet when she turned her face. She pushed back her hood as naturally as she could and went on looking out of the coach window, giving her fellow-travellers a good chance to see that she wasn’t really a pretty woman. For a minute or two she felt a bit self-conscious, but was soon lost again in thinking about the changes she was making and how they were going to cope.
There was the jewellery. Mary had always said they should put every penny into good stones. She had reckoned that they were better than gold coin if you had them in really good settings. And Lotte had been surprised when she had come to look in the false bottom of the chest: there was above three hundred. Surely three hundred ought to keep them for years; and that was in addition to what Mary had kept tied about her, beneath her clothes. Then there was the place Harry had bought in London which was supposed to be Lotte’s, but Mary had seen to everything like that. Surely Mary would have said something if Harry hadn’t made it secure? There was one thing about Mary: she had always looked after them all right in that way; her head was screwed on all right. When it came to things like that, Lotte didn’t know where to start. Mary had always managed to get the last penny out of any manager. Never mind, they’d manage somehow.
Lost in confusion of thoughts, Lotte noticed the cold and discomfort of the journey only superficially, and was putting up at the Dolphin in Southampton almost before she realised it.
Harry Goodenstone was not a man for much deep thought, but he had recently been thinking about things – things to do with himself, the Estate, the farms; what he was going to do now.
He had simmered down a bit, but there were times . . . especially when handling a riding-crop. He would slash it against his knee-boots or leggings, giving himself quite a thrill at the remembrance of letting go at her.
He decided to spend some time at Park Manor and see what was what. He rather liked the idea of becoming a landowner of the new style. Young Harry Goodenstone. A fellow to bring in new ways of doing things. Never be afraid of trying something new. Harry liked that idea.
“Say! Have y’seen Young Goodenstone’s new scheme? Smart young fella. Show us old’ns a thing or two.”
“Heard about Harry Goodenstone’s latest idea for sheep? Trust him to be first with anything new.”
Recognition. Esteem.
He thought that it could be like leading the very latest fashion of dress. Recognition as a leader in . . . well, growing new crops perhaps; a new style. He wondered whether he could have all the cottages on the estate painted. Green? he wondered, or blue? Or a lovely lapis lazuli colour he had commented upon at a little spa. It would make quite a lot of difference when riding out to see squadges of colour tucked here and there. His father had spent a fortune on the house itself, yet when one moved away one was confronted by the cottagers’ squalid, mud-coloured hovels, and Harry thought he might brighten them up.
He had recently been finding out more about their estates abroad, and was surprised that so much of the Goodenstone income came from places he had never even suspected till now. He could not always remember whether it was India or Indies, but he thought perhaps he could take trips to those estates. He liked the idea of going somewhere where it was warm. He saw himself taking a sea voyage and having a look at where his money came from. See tea and coffee growing. He wondered what a tea field would look like. Then he saw himself going in for government.
Parliament. Harry Goodenstone knew that he would only have to let it be known that he was willing and he would soon be offered a seat. He thought up some ideas that would go to present the kind of forward-thinking man he knew he was. He had heard men talk about the new spirit with admiration.
He wondered if he might start a school? He had heard only last year that some noble duke or lord had started a scheme for teaching peasant children. Or a library open to the public? One had been started in Southampton, and Harry had heard very great praise heaped upon the person whose idea it had been.
If he was going into Parliament, Harry thought, people would have great regard for a fellow who was advanced in his thinking, travelled to foreign places, and was philanthropic to boot!
So when the new year came, and Harry Goodenstone had some thoughts about his future, he began to see that life might be quite as jolly thinking up schemes like these as choosing coat-cloth or going after a new horse, and he could still keep up with fashion, of course; the latest plays, London, Bath, that kind of thing.
The thought that had begun to germinate on the day he had looked down upon Cantle after riding hell-for-leather out of Portsmouth now took root. That one had to defend what one owned; side with one’s own kind against the rest. Harry decided that perhaps, after all, his father had had something there, and that it was a good thing that he had not gone rushing back to Portsmouth.
Bella had always been a one for special days. She never said anything to anybody, because when you came to look at it it was a bit soft: there wasn’t really anything special about the day you were born. Not to say you should make anything of it when it came round every year, and Easter wasn’t the same two years running. But remembrances would go through her mind whenever it was a holy day. She would recall others – that Whit Sunday, twenty years ago, was the day when . . . One St Crispin’s, must a been when I was about eight . . . Every spring she remembered previous springs and tended to mull things over every Christmas, and times like that. She often felt a bit down when she realised that another year had gone by. For some reason a new year was worst of all. If you looked back over the one just gone there never seemed much to crow about, and if you looked forward there didn’t seem no reason to think things would get much better.
She didn’t even know what she wanted to happen. These days she just wanted to let it all go. What was she – forty-five, forty-six? Yes, nearly forty-seven – plenty of women had passed on by that age. She didn’t particularly want
to die – there had always been a suspicion at the back of her mind that Heaven and all that was a bit of a carrot the Church held out to keep everybody going – not die, but just sort of let it all go.
Twenty-odd years she had been keeping the place going. The times she had wanted to run away from it all! Once, when Jaen had been just a girl and Jude not much more than a baby, she had gone to see a lawyer about selling up the farm. She had no claim, according to him; no proof that Tomas Nugent was dead. In time the farm might pass to a son. No son. Come back in ten years, and if your husband has not returned . . .
The ten years was long up. Sometimes she thought she would do something about it, but it never seemed to be the right time. Anyway, what was the use? There wasn’t nobody to hand it on to. Jude would settle down in time: if she didn’t marry young Will there’d be somebody, and if he wanted the farm then he’d have to see about all the legal side of it.
If only she’d a had sons. She’d been sure Jude was a boy. The way she was carrying, high; the slow way she moved in the womb – not like Jaen, always jumping and turning months before she was birthed. Perhaps it was God’s judgement on her for praying she wouldn’t have another girl. Perhaps it was His way of showing her that it don’t do. He had not only give her a girl, but one who wasn’t ordinary, nor easy to get on with. No, she didn’t really believe that it was a judgement: that’s what They liked you to believe. Even so, the fact remained. Jude wasn’t never easy; always made you feel she was getting the better of you somehow. Always “at” something or other. There was something striving about Jude, and women never ought to be like that.
If only Jude had been a son. Now, if a boy had a learned to read and write, he could a made summat of it, instead of all that stuff Jude had wasted so much time on: people dead and gone, who wasn’t anybody even when they was alive. Giving in to Jude like that had been a mistake. She’d only intended it to be something to take her mind off things after Jaen went. That’s what comes of being soft! Every time you gave in and did something soft there was trouble. If she hadn’t a give in to Jaen that time. It had went to Jaen’s head – and look what happened. She’d a been soft with Jude. The money that had gone into that week with the Warrens! Money put by for years in case she had to pay lawyers to get the farm sorted out. True, there was money left, but she’d been too hasty. Mind you, Jude hadn’t made no fuss about being laid up all that time, nor still don’t, Bella had to admit that. Even though she still walks a bit dot-and-carry-one with her leg. But life’s hard, and it don’t do to be soft against it.
All Bella wanted was for it all to go away so that she could sit back for a year or two and let somebody else take over worrying. This place needs a man. Why didn’t Jude have the rumgumption to see Will Vickery couldn’t take his eyes off her? He’d got more than his share of Adam in him, that’s for certain. But you couldn’t never talk to her. She’d look at you in that clever way, and you’d feel her looking down at you if you mentioned something like that. You never knew what she was thinking. Deep? She was deep all right.
It was funny, though, she’d never wished Hanna had a been a boy. A boy wouldn’t never put his arms round your neck, and boys wouldn’t never let you dress their warm little body, nor be content to do the baking and seeing to the hens like that little Lovey did. Hanna wasn’t deep, she was a proper little woman. There wasn’t no doubt, Hanna would make somebody a good little wife. She’d be all right.
It was Hanna’s future that occupied Jude’s thoughts following her climb up Beacon.
She knew that she was coming to a kind of crossroads and had been approaching it for quite a time: that much was now clear to her. She could continue on the old, familiar road of land, animals, home, farm and market. There were plenty of people who would give their eye-teeth for that kind of security. Security and going on having the kind of independence they had. They didn’t have much, but it was worth having.
She could take the second road – marriage to Will Vickery. He hadn’t asked her, but he would. It was temptation itself the thought of him. Will, the man; the warm, hard body. Will; non-conformist ideas, secrets, hidden behind the conforming face he presented to the world. The stimulation – two men in one. Will the lover, who had been the means of her discovering that there was a kind of flying ecstasy she had not suspected. Will Vickery, who believed that there was nothing to be ashamed of in their enjoyment of one another.
But what happens when that fades?
What would Will be like when they got to the stage when he got used to her? Home and children were just a small part of a man’s life.
It was the same in the few marriages she knew anything about. Even with people like Dicken and his wife. For all the long, hard labour of their lives, Dicken still came off best of the two. He was master in his own home. He got paid for his work and could say how it was spent: if he wanted to drink it away in the Dragon and Fount, then nobody could say him nay; and the same if he wanted to buy his wife an extravagant shawl, or bread for his family. He had the say.
The third road, you went down blind. Once you took it, you probably had to keep going. Plenty of men took it. Her father had. He had said, in effect: I’ve only got one life and I shall live it the way I want to. Any young man of twenty – it didn’t matter whether he was the highest or the lowest in the land – if he felt as she did, unsettled, searching for something, could just go off and see if he could find what it was.
That’s what I should like. That’s what I want . . . what I need.
There was no knowing where the third road led, but it seemed to Jude that if she did not break free of the farm and at least try to do the vague something that goaded her, then there would be more episodes like that when she ran out of the harvest field. Going that way meant pleasing nobody but yourself, and you had to be strong and not be turned back because people needed you or you needed them.
This train of thought, started on Beacon, went round in Jude’s mind for days. By the end of January she was still as unsettled as ever. She had some idea that perhaps she ought to go and live in Blackbrook to see what she was capable of doing, but she still kept coming back to the problem of what to do about Hanna. She felt responsible for her now. Bella could rub along all right with some help, but she could not bring herself to think of leaving Hanna, isolated except for the company of the ageing Bella and Johnny-twoey.
Will returned from the North in early February and rode over to Croud Cantle at the first opportunity. The place came alive with him. Bella fussed and Hanna giggled. As soon as Jude saw him dismounting in the yard, wearing the cloak in which he had enveloped her on Tradden, she could hardly meet his eye. She had thought of the moment of meeting again a hundred times. In imagination she could greet him dispassionately, resetting their relationship, putting it back to where it was before they had made love on frozen Tradden.
She would be light about it, almost as though it had never happened. It was just an unguarded moment, the wine had gone to her head.
But she had not taken into account the lovely way he spoke, the trace of Irish, the last few words of his sentences rising then falling, and the amusement there always seemed to be in his voice. She had forgotten the arousing, masculine smell of his clothes, and had forgotten, too, the way his eyes could suggest something that the rest of his features, his manner, his conversation did not. So when he doffed his hat and said politely that it had seemed a long time since he was last here, his eyes, flickering up and down her figure as he said “here”, passed her a more intimate message.
Jude knew that, if she was not going to allow herself to be lured down into domesticity as they had lured one another down on to the frosty surface of Tradden, she would have to be forearmed against his charm and her own desire to love him again. She would need to be stronger than ever Bella had been with Tomas.
She had a lesson from Bella and Jaen. They had been blind to the consequences of giving in to your nature, as she had to admit she had been blind herself on Christmas after
noon. She had been lucky that once.
That first visit after returning from the North was only a short one, as he was out on business for White’s. He was puzzled by Jude.
“Is everything all right?”
“Of course. Did you have a good journey?”
She was polite and nice. He had expected anything except politeness, friendliness.
Jude was relieved that he could stop only a short while and that Bella and Hanna were there. It gave her the chance to deal with the sensations that had leaped at her unexpectedly, such as when she saw his breath spurt, swirl and eddy, white into the frosty air, breath that had been inside him, part of him; and again when she noticed how the long muscle at the back of his leg flexed and hardened beneath the cloth of his pale-coloured riding-breeches as he put his foot into the stirrup. Indeed, there seemed to be no part of him safe to look at; no part that she did not want to touch, hold, caress. It was not going to be easy to keep him at arm’s length.
“I shall be this way again quite soon.”
“You make sure you are then,” said Bella.
And when he came that way again, Jude saw to it that she was fully occupied with necessary work. Supervising and helping Dicken and Johnny-twoey in the opening up of some clamps of vegetables for market.
“Jude, you might a left off doing that for a minute today and come in and talked to Will,” said Bella.