by Maggie Hope
A horse and trap was standing outside her door when she got back, loosely tethered to the lamp post. She looked at it curiously. Someone had an unusual visitor but it couldn’t be her, she didn’t know anyone with a horse and trap. No one who would come to the house at least. She dismissed it from her mind as she opened her door.
‘Tucker?’ she called, a little apprehensively. She had been gone longer than she had expected, for the store had been crowded and she was well aware that Tucker might have got bored with his younger brother and gone out. As she walked through to the kitchen, taking off her hat as she went, a figure rose from the armchair and she started with surprise.
‘Mrs Cornish?’
It was the gentleman who had brought Kit up from the old pit shaft, smiling at her as she put her shopping basket down on the table. She didn’t have time to open her mouth before Tucker rushed into excited speech.
‘It’s Mr Dale, Mam. He’s come to see if our Kit’s better. An’ he’s brought him a present, Mam, an’ me an’ all.’
‘A present?’
‘Nothing much, just a token,’ the man broke in. ‘I was interested in knowing how the boy was.’
‘Grand, he’s doing grand.’ Meg looked up into dark eyes, dark, velvety eyes, kind, concerned eyes, the nicest eyes she had ever seen, she thought distractedly.
‘I took him up to see our Kit, Mam,’ said Tucker. ‘An’ he’s brought him a rocking-horse. A rocking-horse, Mam! Something to hurry up and get better for, like, so that our Kit can ride him. His name’s Neddy.’
Tucker was so excited his words were falling over each other so that it was a moment or two before Meg understood what he was saying.
‘A rocking-horse? Eeh, you shouldn’t have done that, Sir. A rocking-horse must have cost a mint of money.’ No wonder Tucker was excited. No other child in the rows had a rocking-horse, there just wasn’t the money for toys as grand as that.
‘Don’t worry, Mrs Cornish,’ Jonty assured her. ‘It’s just an old one from the nursery at Gr— at my home. It was nothing, I assure you. And I’ve stood it beside the boy’s bed. He can look at it, it will encourage him to get well.’
‘He brought me some toy soldiers, Mam,’ cried Tucker, holding them up for her to see, and obligingly she looked at them. They were a bit battered it was true, but they were soldiers still and Tucker would have a fine time with them. His eyes were shining more than they had on Christmas morning last year, she saw. He was fair bubbling with excitement.
‘They’re real bonny, they are,’ she said, his delight in the toys making her smile. Tucker ranged his soldiers on the table beside her basket. There were six of them in scarlet coats and tall black hats, resplendent still, though in places the paint had rubbed down to the metal beneath.
‘It’s very kind of you, Sir. Mr Dale, did you say? Please sit down. I’ll make some tea. Will you have some tea?’
‘I don’t want to impose,’ said Jonty, but he sat down nevertheless and watched her as she put the kettle on the fire and brought the biscuit tin out from the pantry. Luckily, she had a set of nice china cups and saucers which Alice had cajoled her brothers into buying for Meg last Christmas. She’d have been mortified if she’d had to offer him tea in a pint pot.
‘I’ll never be able to thank you enough for what you did for Kit,’ she said fervently as she handed him his tea and sat down facing him. Tucker was standing at the table, already deep in a battle with his loyal troop of soldiers, issuing commands to them in a low voice and the next moment lifting his arm in an arc and zooming in on them, knocking one down.
‘Boom, boom,’ he cried, imitating guns.
Meg glanced at him before turning back to Jonty. ‘You are so very kind an’ all,’ she said softly.
He smiled. ‘Well, they were just lying around the old nursery, there’s no children to play with them now.’
He took a sip of tea and Meg was thankful that she’d had some real milk in the house to put in it, she’d bought it for Kit.
‘Still, it was very good of you, Sir,’ she insisted.
‘Oh please, don’t call me that, it makes me feel old,’ he said. ‘My name’s John. Do call me John.’
‘Well …’ Meg was about to object to such familiarity but just then the front door opened and she heard her sister’s footsteps.
‘Auntie Alice! Auntie Alice!’ Tucker broke off his game abruptly and ran to the door to meet her. ‘Look what Mr Dale brought us.’
Alice halted in the doorway and stared at the man sitting in Meg’s rocking-chair and drinking tea from a china cup.
‘He brought us soldiers, Auntie Alice,’ Tucker cried impatiently. She wasn’t showing the interest in the soldiers he thought she should.
‘Yes, pet,’ said Alice, and dropped her gaze to the toys. ‘Grand, they are.’
‘Oh, Mr Dale, this is my sister, Alice. You remember, she was there when—’
‘Yes, of course.’ Jonty rose to his feet and held out his hand to the young woman, who blushed with embarrassment as she hesitantly took it in hers.
‘Miss Alice, er—?’ Jonty lifted an enquiring eyebrow at her.
‘Maddison,’ she mumbled, suddenly seeming to Meg very shy and overwhelmed for a girl who professed to be completely uninterested in men.
‘Maddison, Miss Alice Maddison,’ he murmured. ‘Do sit down, Miss Maddison.’ He pulled out a chair from the table and offered it to her.
Maddison, he thought, glancing at Meg. Of course it was Maddison, he had known it would be.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jonty drove back to Grizedale Hall full of old longings and dreams and a wild determination not to lose sight of Meg now that he had found her. He had sat in her kitchen and talked to her and her sister Alice, and had been filled with a feeling of homecoming. Every gesture the sisters made, every expression on their faces, seemed familiar to him. It must be their mother, his Aunt Hannah, they reminded him of, he mused, even though he had only vague memories of her.
He had looked into Meg Cornish’s eyes and his lost childhood had returned to him. He had been loath to leave the kitchen of the little cottage in the colliery rows and go back to the large, cold and decaying mansion which was his home.
‘I’ll call again,’ he had said to Meg as he left, ‘to see how the boy goes on, I mean.’
‘You’re very kind,’ she had answered as conventions prescribed and watched as he turned the horse and trap round and drove away up the row. He had turned at the corner and she was still standing there and he had given her a salute with his whip and she had smiled and his heart sang as he went on his way.
His feelings of warm elation were soon doused as he opened the front door of the Hall. The sound of raised voices from the floor above came resounding down the wide staircase, his father’s bullying tones the loudest.
‘Don’t you tell me what Father said, you mean old bitch. God rot his soul in hell, and yours too. I’ve a good mind to throw you out on the streets, you—’
Ralph’s words were slurred. Obviously he had been drinking again that morning.
‘Ralph, Ralph, I know you don’t mean it, son, you don’t. It’s the drink talking,’ quavered the old woman.
Jonty took the stairs two at a time, his anger mounting as he heard a crash from his grandmother’s bedroom. As he reached the door he saw that she was cowering down in bed with her son towering over her, his face suffused with rage. Beside him was an overturned chair, obviously the cause of the crash. Jonty strode into the room and thrust his father roughly to one side.
‘Get out! Do you hear me? Get out. And don’t you come in here again,’ he cried.
‘What the hell …?’ Ralph blustered, but retreated nevertheless before Jonty’s fury.
Ralph was not the man he used to be. Years of riotous living had taken their toll. He was stoop-shouldered and paunchy, his hands covered with liver spots and his face a map of red and purple veins.
‘I have a right to come and see my own mother,’ he sho
uted now, taking a little courage from the fact that Jonty had turned away from him. But his son ignored him for the moment.
‘Are you all right, Grandmother?’ he asked gently. ‘Shall I get you some tea? Come now, let me help you to sit up, you know you can’t breathe too well lying down.’
Mrs Grizedale gratefully let him lift her to a sitting position and plump up the pillows behind her. Jonty put an arm round her thin shoulders, feeling her trembling, almost shaking, with fear.
‘You’re not going out again, are you, Jonty?’
‘No, Grandmother. I’ll stay with you for a while,’ he promised.
‘That’s right, Grandmother’s little boy,’ sneered Ralph who was still standing in the doorway. ‘The old witch always did think more of you than me, her own son. I was always the wicked one, the one who dared to enjoy life. Not like that sanctimonious old sod who was my father!’
Jonty gently covered his grandmother’s shoulders with a woollen shawl, ignoring his father’s taunts though he was well aware that every word was upsetting her more.
‘Don’t listen, Grandmother. He’s drunk. I’ll get you some tea to calm your nerves,’ he said to her before striding to the door and confronting his father. ‘Are you going to go or do I have to throw you out?’ he asked quietly.
Ralph laughed. ‘Oh, yes, throw me out of my own house, would you? That’d be a fine thing. A misbegotten son like you throwing a man out of his own house.’
Still he backed away before Jonty’s threatening stance and started to descend the stairs.
‘Don’t worry, I’m going anyway, I’m not staying in this hole. I’m off for a bit of life.’
Ralph took his hat and coat from the hall stand and lurched out on to the drive. It was a long time since he had seriously stood up to his son.
Escape was his father’s usual answer whenever he was thwarted, Jonty thought as he watched Ralph’s erratic progress round to the stables, wondering for a moment if he ought to stop him. His father was in no condition to ride anywhere, let alone the ten miles or so to Darlington which was where his cronies hung out. But in the end he closed the front door and went into the kitchen to get a tray of tea and biscuits for his grandmother. The old lady came first.
‘What did he want, Grandmother?’ he asked as he poured her tea into a dainty china cup and handed it to her. ‘Money, was it?’
She didn’t answer, though a silent tear ran down her withered cheek.
Jonty sat down by the hearth, his thoughts bitter. Now his grandmother was upset, he wouldn’t be able to go out again and he had work to do in the stables. It was so long since they had had any proper help with the horses. Though if things went on the way they were, there would be none to look after soon. Sometimes he got so tired of trying to hold the estate together, if it wasn’t for his grandmother he would have taken the money his grandfather had left him and emigrated to Canada, or Australia, or anywhere away from here. Instead the money he had come into on his twenty-first birthday was earning interest in a bank, well away from his father’s clutches, and the interest was being used up fast in staving off the day when the estate finally went bankrupt. His grandmother had a tiny income left from railway shares and his father was always trying to get money out of her.
His thoughts returned to the little colliery house in Winton, the love he saw between the two sisters and the children. Where was the husband? he wondered. There was no evidence of a man living in the house, no smell of tobacco, no men’s shirts hanging on the overhead airer along with the other washing. Was Meg a widow then?
Meg was wondering about Jonty that afternoon too as she rubbed lard into flour and cooked meat for pie fillings. Dreamily, she rolled out pastry, made pies and put them in the oven, her hands working automatically at the oft-repeated tasks but most of her mind was free to go wherever her wandering thoughts wanted.
She dreamed of dark, velvety eyes smiling at her and was filled with unfamiliar feelings, urges, such as she hadn’t felt for years.
‘Mam! Mam!’
Kit calling from the bedroom brought her down to earth with a crash. She wiped her hands and hurried upstairs to attend to him. She’d been building pie in the sky that day. It was the real kind she had to get on with, never mind dreaming about a dark-eyed gentleman who couldn’t possibly be in the least interested in her. He’d only come to see Kit, she reminded herself. When the child recovered she would likely never see him again.
So when Jonty came calling again, a few days later, Meg insisted on calling him ‘Sir’ and was deferentially formal with him, fearing he might see in her eyes that she was attracted to him and be embarrassed or, worse, amused.
But Jonty was not to be put off. He came no more to George Row but got into the habit of regularly riding past Old Pit Cottages where the aged miner, Bill, had told him Meg often came to help out. But it was some months before this strategy paid off.
* * *
‘Mr Dale, how nice to see you,’ exclaimed Meg, putting down the basket of bread and pies which she was taking to the cottages.
Jonty took off his hat and smiled in delight at finally seeing her. ‘And you too, Mrs Cornish, how are you? And Kit, how is he? His leg is mended, I hope?’
‘Oh, aye, thank you, he’s grand,’ said Meg. ‘The lads are both at school now, so I’m on my own.’
‘At least they won’t be getting into mischief, then,’ said Jonty, hardly knowing what he was saying, as he was so busy watching the dimples in her cheeks below the bright blue eyes and the sun glinting on her corn-coloured hair.
‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Well, they can still do that, the pair of them. But at least the old shaft is fenced in now.’
‘Yes.’
They stood for a moment, looking over to the old workings, now fenced in by the Winton Colliery joiner. The owners had even supplied a new cover for the shaft, made of strong new wood.
Meg thought about that awful day, the nightmare of terror when Kit had fallen down the shaft. She would never forget it, nor the courage of this man who had brought the child out, miraculously alive. She shivered.
‘Cold?’ asked Jonty, surprised.
‘No, I was thinking of what might have happened if you hadn’t been there that day,’ she answered.
‘Oh, someone would have gone down, I didn’t do so much,’ he murmured.
Meg smiled her disbelief. ‘Aye, but you did, and I’ll always bless you for it, Sir.’
‘John. My name’s John,’ he insisted.
‘John,’ she said softly, her resolve weakening as she looked up at him. By, he was a grand man, she thought dreamily, so kind and good, not giving himself any airs like some gentlemen did.
Jonty indicated the basket. ‘Can I help you with that?’ he asked.
‘I–I was just taking it to the miners’ houses,’ she replied. ‘Leftovers from yesterday. I let them have the pies at cost.’
‘I’ll walk along with you, then.’
Jonty picked up the basket in one hand, leading his horse with the other, and walked along to Old Pit Cottages with her and waited for her to deliver the pies.
‘Wot cheor, Sir.’ A couple of the old men, one of them Bill, were idling on the end of the row, sitting on their hunkers and smoking clay pipes. Jonty acknowledged the greeting courteously. They watched curiously as he stood there, the reins of his horse hanging loosely to allow his horse to graze on the new grass springing up by the roadside.
They watched without comment as Meg came out again and joined Jonty, and the two of them walked along the track back to the road. Then Bill took his pipe out of his mouth and pointed it after them.
‘Likely he’s just been asking after the lad like,’ he said, and frowned heavily beneath bushy eyebrows at his companion, daring him to suggest there was anything more to it.
‘Aye,’ answered his companion, gazing peaceably into the distance. Bill’s unspoken warning was not needed. If any gossip was going to get out about that canny lass, Meg Cornish, why, it wouldn’t
be him that started it. The lass had enough to put up with, what with that man of hers. And Wesley Cornish had a lot to answer for any road. By, he was the scandal of the place since he took up with that Sally Hawkins, a lass no better than she should be even before she started carrying on with poor Meg’s man. The old man took his pipe out of his mouth and spat on the ground at the thought of the brazen hussy.
‘You live on your own with the two boys?’ asked Jonty.
‘Aye.’
‘You’re a widow, then?’ he probed, hoping she might answer in the affirmative.
No,’ Meg blushed painfully. ‘Wesley doesn’t live with us. He’s my husband, like.’
‘Oh.’ Jonty was sorry he had brought it up, it had created a moment of embarrassment between them.
‘He lives with another woman,’ she said baldly.
Jonty’s eyes widened. It was the new century and things were changing in the modern world, but this was something unusual in a pit village, he was sure.
He’s wondering what I did to drive my man off, Meg thought miserably. He must be scandalized. They walked on in silence until they came to the junction where the track joined the road back to Winton Colliery and here they halted and looked at each other. Meg’s cheeks were still rosy and she looked quickly down at her basket, biting her lip.
‘I didn’t mean to pry,’ he said gently, taking her hand.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, her voice low and throaty, hardly above a whisper.
He looked down at her hand, red and work-roughened and so small in his own. He drank in the scent of her, fresh and female and smelling faintly of lye soap. He marvelled at the way her hair sprang, so thick and abundant, in a straight line above her white forehead. And he did not want to let her go.
‘I have to get back for the bairns,’ she murmured.
‘Yes,’ he said, lifting her hand to his lips. ‘Will you be back this way soon?’
‘Probably on Tuesday.’
‘I may see you then.’
Meg set off down the road, knowing he was still standing by the path, watching her go. Her hand felt warm where he had kissed it, the first time anyone had ever kissed it. She lifted it up to her own mouth, touching the spot which he had kissed with her own lips. By, he was a grand man, she thought, a lovely man, so fine and handsome and bonny. Even his slight limp was attractive to her, romantic, and at the same time making her feel slightly protective.