by Betty Burton
After a particularly bad night, the best treatment was to walk out over the chalkhills, as I had done all my life, and this I did one hot Sunday afternoon in August.
I had not been up Bellpitt Lane and on to the Tump for months, and I chose to sit as I had on another Sunday. What years ago it seemed since Mrs Trowell and I had sat there. I took deep breaths, filling my lungs with the hot, sweet air that rose from the hills.
I relaxed into playing a game about the colours of August. Purple geranium, loose-strife, hyssop, self-heal, scabious, flax.
Two figures came into view; tiny, climbing Bellpitt Lane. Viper’s grass? Not in August . . . Sunday afternoon. Few people had occasion to climb Winchester Hill on Sundays . . . Yellow flax, rest-harrow, wandering sailor, golden rod. Did golden rod count? Yes, accept golden rod, for it did grow on the lower slope . . .
Two women. No, one was a child, but tall, as tall as the woman. She kept running after something – butterflies perhaps – then skipping, then coming back to the woman, who kept up her steady walk up Bellpitt Lane. Curious as to who was as queer as myself, walking up Winchester unnecessarily on a hot afternoon, I watched their progress.
They each wore the everyday dress of country women and stout boots. The girl’s wide, straw hat was hanging down her back, and her tight brown curls tumbled about. The woman wore a deep-brimmed bonnet, tied round with a scarf hiding her face. As they came close, I lay back against the rim of the dish of Bell Tump and listened to the arguments of the rooks in Park Manor.
As the two came close, I could hear the woman. I thought it was someone that I knew.
“No, Rosie. Careful. Not there, Rosie.” The woman’s voice was raised and strained, pronouncing each word separately, distinctly, carefully.
Not a Cantle voice. Blackbrook? It was a town voice, but difficult to place because of the way the woman was using it. A town voice, yet the bonnet was old-fashioned, like those worn by old women for gleaning in the hot sun. The calling stopped as they came closer to where I lay.
“Miss Nugent.” The woman spoke my name as though she could not believe who it was.
I raised my head, but what with the deep bonnet and the sun behind the women’s back, I could not see who it was. I certainly did not know the girl who was looking warily at me from behind the woman.
“Judeth. Isn’t it strange that we should meet on the same spot we last met.”
“Mrs Trowell!” I leapt to my feet. “I . . .” I had been about to say that I did not recognise her, that she looked so different; but I checked tongue in time, for the difference in her appearance was extreme, and she must be conscious of it. The pretty pink and white girl was gone and was replaced by a woman. Charlotte Trowell and Young Harry’s Lotte had been superseded by a mature woman with lines in her brow; hard-wearing skirts and boots. But not just that – her youthful, lovely face was destroyed: the line of a puckered scar ran diagonally from her brow, over the eye-lid and down to the ear lobe.
“I was just wondering who it could be walking up here on a hot Sunday. I should have known. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else,” I said.
“May we sit with you?”
“Of course. I am so pleased to see you again.”
She took the girl by the hand and drew her forward, so that I could see that she was not a child, but a young woman.
“Judeth. This is Rosalynd – Rosie.”
I said hello to Rosie, who returned my greeting with almost a smile and a glance at Mrs Trowell to see if she approved. Mrs Trowell patted Rosie’s hand and looked the girl directly in the face. “Rosie, this is Judeth.” Rosie watched Mrs Trowell’s mouth and tried to say my name.
“Rosie can hardly hear at all and can’t speak, but she’s learning.” As she said this she nodded and smiled at the girl whose eyes flicked quickly from one to the other of us.
We sat on Bell Tump.
“Is your sister . . .? Is Mary . . .?” When there is such an obvious change in a person, you have to tread a bit warily, to speculate about other changes.
“Mary’s dead. Smallpox. Not long after we left . . . that place.”
I m sorry.
“I still miss her, but in another way it is better. She always persuaded me it was best for Rosie to live away from all that . . . all that sort of life we were in. On my own I have to make my own mind up. I hadn’t ever done that before.”
There was a short silence, then Mrs Trowell said, “You know who Rosie is, Judeth?”
I did indeed know who Rosie was, even though until now I had never suspected her existence, and I was pleased, pleased and moved by the strange girl.
“Rosie’s my sister.”
Mrs Trowell covered her face with both hands, stifling tears. Rosie looked at her mother with great concern. Mrs Trowell recovered immediately, smiled at Rosie and patted her reassuringly.
“It’s all right, Rosie. All right.”
It was an extraordinary meeting.
A thousand fragments of thoughts ran through my mind. Why were they climbing Winchester; the face; the scar; Mother, Jaen, Rosie. Rosie.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Sorry? Why, child, it’s only that you said the most unexpected thing.”
She called me “child”, and corrected the balance of our relationship. That had been tilted while she was Young Harry’s Lotte.
“Isn’t she my sister, then?”
“Yes, yes, of course, but of all the things you might have said. ‘Your daughter’, ‘Harry’s child’, ‘my father’s bastard’; but you said, ‘my sister’.”
“Not Harry Goodenstone’s, never! And no . . . not bastard, it’s a word I can’t abide; it’s always the child that gets the harm of it. I can’t tell why, but I was sure that she must be my sister.”
“You are much the same age. Though Rosie is . . . It is hard when you can’t hear, it means that you can’t speak. She isn’t . . . I don’t find it easy to put into words.”
“You mean that Rosie is like me and you?”
“Yes, except that we were lucky enough to learn things the easy way, by being told. Just because she can’t speak does not mean that she has anything else wrong with her.”
Mrs Trowell nodded and smiled at Rosie, and again mouthed, “Judeth”. “She understands what I say. She just cannot say words herself.”
Again we sat quietly for a minute. It seemed that there were so many things to be said, but we said none of them.
“I’ve been to Harry’s. I didn’t know what had happened, about him marrying and all that. I wouldn’t have come anywhere near, but I didn’t know which way to turn. I wrote to him time and time again, but he didn’t answer. I told him all I wanted was the papers. I spent nearly the last penny coming here. There’s a house: it’s mine; it’s what Harry settled on me when I went to live with him – you know, on a permanent kind of basis – years ago. The house is entirely mine, except that Harry has got the papers. I shall have to sell it. I really haven’t got a penny. And Harry’s got the papers. The place is empty. It’s not doing it any good standing empty and I can’t sell it without the papers. And I wouldn’t have asked, except that I don’t know what else to do.”
“They’ve shut up the Big House. I believe they have gone on one of the trading ships belonging to her family. They reckon it might be four years or more before they come home.”
“That’s what she said.” She tightened her mouth and swallowed her hurt. “Mrs Cutts. Oh, like a fool I went round to the side door. I had sense enough not to go up to the main door, but the side door was too good for us. She made us stand at the scullery door like tinkers. She needn’t have done that. I didn’t want anything except my papers. It was humiliating. You’ve no idea.”
But I had. I knew the Mrs Cutts and the Ol Blackwells who were, in their way, as bad as – perhaps worse than – the gentry. Because the Cutts and Blackwells, in aping the self-esteem of their employers, humiliated their own kind. To me they were odious.
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br /> “What will you do?”
“I don’t know. I just do not know.”
“You could come home.”
“Home?”
“With me. To the farm.”
“No!”
She seemed horrified at the idea.
“Why not?”
“Because . . . Everything! Your mother. We couldn’t. You couldn’t just . . . I could never walk back there more than twenty years after.”
“It’s Rosie’s home, isn’t it?”
We sat silently. My words melted as a question, then reformed as a statement of fact, and hung in the air with us. If my father’s daughter’s home was not at Croud Cantle, then where was it?
“It isn’t possible.”
“You have nowhere else to go.”
“Mrs Nugent. It would be wrong to expect her to accept such a thing.”
“You would find her very changed.” I told her about the convulsion and what it had done to her.
“Then we could not possibly go there. It would make her worse. No, I shall go on to Blackbrook. We shall manage.”
“Would you let Rosie come, if I can find you a place to sleep? Just for now. It will give you time to see the Agent who is looking after the estate.”
In the end she gave in to my suggestion and I took her into the village, where Rob Netherfield’s parents gave Mrs Trowell a place in with Rob’s children. I told Rob the bare bones and he said, “It seems only right, don’t it? The girl can’t help what her father did.”
Rosie did not mind coming with me. Mrs Trowell placed Rosie’s hand between the two palms of mine and said, “Rosie-go-with-Judeth.” Rosie nodded and came with me up Howgaite Path. She kept her hand in mine all the way, looking about her, interested, intelligent, smiling and nodding at me from time to time, approvingly, I thought.
I had no time, nor did I attempt, to try to think what I would say to Mother. I was sure that taking Rosie home was right and that was all that seemed to matter for the time being.
We reached home and found that Maisie had brought my mother’s chair out so that she could sit under the tree, as I once had that time I hurt my leg. She heard the gate latch and looked up at us. With Rosie still holding my hand like a child I took her to my mother. At that moment I realised the implications of my spontaneous action. I suddenly felt apprehensive, but stopped any tremors so that Rosie would not feel them. However much I felt the rights of my action, the stress might be too much.
“Mother, I’ve brought somebody to stop for a few days.”
My mother peered at Rosie.
“Her name is Rosie. She can’t hear what anybody says, but she can tell things from people’s lips if you look straight at her. I’ll get us all something to eat and then I want to talk to you about Rosie.”
I knew that I was putting off telling her, but I thought that if she had a chance to be with Rosie a little while, see what a gentle nature Rosie had, then she might accept the situation a bit better. I was trying to tell Rosie to stay with my mother, when Mother darted out her good hand and held on tightly to Rosie, drawing her close, peering into her face. Then Mother’s head dropped and tears streamed down her face.
“Tomas. Her father. Tomas,” she said, in her slack-jawed speech.
I was astounded. She could not possibly have known. Mrs Trowell had told me that apart from her sister and the woman who had cared for Rosie for twenty years, there was no one who knew who Rosie was.
Rosie, when she saw Mother’s tears, took the scarf from her hat and began to wipe them away, making concerned motions, as if to say, don’t, don’t cry; as though she could not bear to see anyone cry.
If the moment when I had realised that Rosie was my sister was overwhelming, then my mother’s action was the more so. She drew Rosie’s hand up to her face and brushed it with as near a kiss as she could make.
“Yes, she’s Rosie Nugent, but you couldn’t have known that, Mother.”
In her difficult way of speaking she said, “She’s Tomas over again. Beautiful. Like Tomas, beautiful. Same hair, face is alike, just like. You and Jaen all Estover – no Tomas in you. She is all Nugent. No . . .” she halted, looking all round her, up at me, back at Rosie, quite perturbed for a moment. “No Holly in her. No Holly.” And I supposed that must be true, for I could see nothing of the pink and white of Mrs Trowell.
At that time, I had no idea what it was that had given Rosie her particular quality. She had a kind of innocence, yet she was not childish; had quietness but not silence; she could not speak or hear, yet appeared to understand what was important. She had not heard what my mother and I were saying but she had seen Mother crying and it had concerned her: never mind what made the tears, give comfort, care.
Had I known my mother better, perhaps I would not have been surprised that she not merely accepted Rosie, but opened up to her in the way she had to Hanna but had never done to me. She allowed affection to be given to her, and she gave.
I said nothing much to Mother about Mrs Trowell on the evening that Rosie arrived, except that the Netherfields had taken her in. Maisie came back from visiting someone in Motte and did not look for an explanation for Rosie’s sudden appearance. She was a bit ill at ease at first, having to use ways of communicating that were strange, but Rosie’s smiles and nods soon won Maisie over. Rosie was settled in Mother’s old room and I went to help my mother get out of her day clothes.
I was always careful not to let her know that I knew about her little hordes of secret pickings. Fluff, moss, feathers picked from her quilt, shaped into nests exactly like those of the goldcrest. It was strange behaviour which I could not understand, except as a sign that there was something not right in her head, but it was not important and it did no harm. On that evening though, when I went to her, I saw that she had been crushing up nests and had apparently been throwing them into the fire. She seemed more co-operative about getting her bodice and skirt off and I thought that her speech seemed not so slurred. I had the impression that she had squared her shoulders and might almost have stumped off into the yard.
“No room at Netherfields,” she said.
“It is only for a night.”
“Rosie can stay.”
“We can’t talk about it tonight. Tomorrow.”
“She must not come here. Rosie can stay.”
Early next morning Rob Netherfield came into the house. I had said that I would go down to the schoolroom early and meet Charlotte there.
“Well, young Jude? You have some queer ideas, I’ll be bound.”
“There wasn’t anything else we could do.”
“I don’t care, but they won’t like it down there.” He nodded in the direction of Cantle. “Nor will old Tripp. Give him a chance to drag out his old sermon about The Sins of the Fathers visited on the children.”
“They’ll have to lump it then.”
“Jude, you a have to be sensible. They’d make her life a misery, let alone yourn.”
“I know. I only asked you to keep her there for the night.”
“It’s not my place, is it? It’s the old people’s, and they’m only there on sufferance because my Dad still turns out a good pack of hounds for the Estate – old as he is.”
Rob was right. It was a queer idea to think that we could deal with the result of my long-dead father’s actions in such a simple way as “they can lump it”.
We needed to talk to someone outside the tangle, so I got Rob to ride over Blackbrook with a note asking Fred if he would come.
I put Rosie’s hand between Maisie’s as Mrs Trowell had done with mine and said to her, “Maisie”. She pressed her lips together as though to say an “M”, then smiled and nodded that she understood. When I left them to go down to the schoolroom, she had taken off my mother’s cap and was brushing and fluffing out her hair, which was now creamy-white about her head, but with a still-red knot at the back.
It being the height of a hot, dry harvest season, the schoolroom was empty and it was there that Fred
Warren came. Mrs Trowell and I had been together there talking for a couple of hours. She had said, “I thought you might call me by my name – I isn’t really Mrs Trowell. It’s a name Mary thought up and I’ve been it so long I don’t even think of myself as really being a Holly any more.”
I said, “Charlotte?” and she smiled and said, “It’s a rare long time since anybody called me that.”
We sat with a small meal of bread and bacon dripping and talked. She told me how she had come by the scar on her face.
“It was done in a second. I don’t think Harry even realised it had touched me. It had a kind of a hair whisk on it – the crop – it was that that did it. It was like a burn. The hair had been made stiff with some kind of glue, and perhaps that got into the cut, or it could have been the powder and rouge. It festered up and was bad for a long time. Anyway, it’s better now.” She smiled wryly. “But there an’t much call for a one-eyed Ophelia, nor many parts for a messenger-boy with a scar.”
She was trying to make light of it. She was not one-eyed, although the lid was badly puckered, but I did think that the scar left on her memory must have been worse.
“I don’t really care about it any more. I always think when people see me first on my good side, then sees the other, they act as though they’ve bit into an apple and found half a maggot in it. That’s why I keep my hair so low and wear that old bonnet. I got used to it – the cut – but it’s always new to people who don’t know me.” She smiled again. “And since I left the theatre, that means most people.”
By the time that Fred arrived, Charlotte had told much of what had happened to her since she had fled from Park Manor to Portsmouth. Harry’s violent jealousy, Mary’s death, then finding herself with not much to live on and being cheated or held over a barrel each time she sold a piece of jewellery.
Rosie had lived in the country ever since she was a baby, and had been brought up by a woman who had an idiot child. They had all thought that there had been something wrong with Rosie’s brain, but it was only her hearing. As soon as the woman had realised, she had taught Rosie by showing her.