Daughter of Dark River Farm

by Terri Nixon

  Whichever shed I chose at random would leave the way clear for him if I was wrong, and no-one to block his escape. So I stayed in the middle of the yard, and called out, as I had at the railway station, but this time with a calm voice. ‘Nathan, you can’t take the diamond. You’ll be killed for it. I can help. I have money. Just come out and let me talk to you.’

  No movement, no sound. I tried again, my certainty that he was there never wavering. ‘I’ll give you all of it, if you’ll come back to the farm with me!’ The silence bounced back at me, and frustration started to build. ‘Don’t you trust me?’ But of course he didn’t; where would I get money from, when I’d just told him how desperately we needed those few tools?

  ‘Nathan, the money was a gift for Amy, from those two girls who came today. You can have it all if you let her go!’

  Still nothing. Well then, I’d simply wait until he came out. I moved across to the wide, open gateway, and sat down, my back against the post so I faced into the yard. If he came out of one of the sheds or stables I’d be sure to see him.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, staring into the night, but I felt my eyes growing heavy; the fears and tensions, and the hard work of the past few days were starting to tug at the last of my strength, leaving me light-headed, and floating dangerously into slumber. I blinked hard, and renewed my attention on the dark, silent sheds, one by one, listening out for the slightest movement from within, but there was none; Nathan and Amy must be asleep. It couldn’t hurt, then, for me to… My eyes drifted shut and I snapped them open. I mustn’t. He knew I was here now, and would be extremely cautious; if he crept by me while I slept I might not wake up. The night walked on, touching me with chilly fingers as it passed, and brushing my skin with its soothing quiet. I heard Pirate’s hooves in the grass over in the field; sound carried more clearly than I’d realised. I heard the grass protest and finally tear free as he pulled up mouthfuls and chewed them, and I heard him whicker softly in the darkness, a lazy, contented sound.

  How wonderful it had been for Archie to have had the chance to ride him, and not just to hack him gently along the lane, but to let him have his head, to remember the glorious combination of a powerful horse and the open moors after so long. I could feel a little smile on my face at the memory of Archie’s breathless laughter, and my mind’s eye drifted over his tall, strong form as he sat upright in the saddle, his graceful hands light on the reins, his thighs gripping Pirate’s flanks and urging him on, and on, and on…

  I jerked upright. How long had I slept? Maybe less than a minute, maybe much longer. My head had fallen to the side—that’s what had awoken me, and I raised it now to find the tiny crescent moon. Not as much as an hour, but probably a good deal more than a minute. I scrambled to my feet, reluctantly letting go of the idea of waiting Nathan out; the risk was too great. My thoughts turned, once again, to how to get him to reveal himself so I could block his escape.

  I looked around, as best I could in the weak moonlight. There were four large sheds. They would be thickly laid with sawdust in places. A row of stables, from before the war when there had been horses to fill them. Amy might be in any one of them, asleep, I hoped, but maybe wide awake and terrified to make a sound. I was still sure Nathan wouldn’t hurt her, but she didn’t know that. She had only her past experiences to go by, and a noisy child in the same place as a street-girl trying to make a wage would soon be silenced by any means to hand. All her life she’d have been threatened if she made a sound, and ignored if she didn’t. Lucky to find a meal, no home comforts, no toys to play with. No wonder she…

  The idea bloomed. I caught my breath, and thought it through quickly. Was it too dangerous for Amy? I didn’t think so; in fact I was counting on the opposite to be true, and Nathan’s reaction to this would prove it one way or the other. If he wouldn’t answer, then I had to break Amy’s silence instead, and there was only one way to do it.

  I moved into the middle of the yard, and tried to keep my attention on all four sheds, and the stables, at once. ‘Nathan,’ I called, putting a new urgency in my tone, my fingernails cutting into my palms as fear and readiness took hold together. ‘This is important. I know you don’t want to hurt Amy, so I need you to listen. If she has a ribbon pinned to her dress, with a silver spoon on it. You have to take it off her. It’s…’ I thought frantically, but could think of nothing convincing. ‘It’s dangerous,’ I finished lamely. There was a silence. I waited a moment, then was about to throw some fantastical but desperate explanation that it had been used to spread rat poison in the barn, but, thankfully I didn’t need to; a moment later an outraged wail cut through the night air. My feet launched me across the yard, and before Amy’s cry had died away, my sore and blistered hands were pulling at the end stable door.

  Inside I blinked rapidly, and, as the thin moonlight shone into the stable I saw movement, and heard Nathan’s tired, defeated voice. ‘Go to her, Amy. Go on. It’s all right.’

  Small feet rustled the hay, and a moment later Amy was standing beside me and I dropped to my knees. I could hear Nathan still talking, but ignored him, and folded Amy into my arms, dropping kisses on her head and listening instead to her quiet, calm breathing, as if it were the most glorious symphony ever heard. After a moment I felt her hands drop away from the spoon and slowly, sweetly, wrap themselves around me in return.

  When I could bear to ease away from her, I sat down and gathered her into my lap, blocking the door, although Nathan could easily have knocked me aside. I didn’t think he would, and I was right. His babbled words started to make sense, and I gave half of my attention to them while the other half was on the solid, comforting weight of the child in my lap, and the small sounds of concentration she was making as she pushed stray bits of hay into the lace-holes in her shoes.

  ‘I don’t know why I did it,’ Nathan was saying. ‘I wasn’t thinking. Is he… Will he be…’ It sounded as though the words had been dragged from his throat with barbed wire, and he was terrified of hearing the answer.

  My anger flared again, hot and tight in my stomach. ‘I don’t know,’ I said with complete honesty. Archie had rallied so often, each time falling into an increasingly weaker state immediately afterwards… Fear wormed its way through me again, and I could hear it reflected in Nathan’s voice.

  ‘Kitty, if I’ve hurt him—’

  ‘Of course you’ve hurt him!’ Amy stiffened slightly, and I dropped my voice, but sounded no less furious. ‘If that thing had been two inches higher you’d have stuck it in his neck!’ He gave a sob, and I fought the natural urge to try and ease his terror; how could I, when I shared it?

  His voice cracked. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘You can come back to the farm. Show some remorse, put things right.’

  ‘No! I can’t. They’ll find me, and when they do, they’ll kill me.’

  ‘They still will, even if you give them that diamond. Especially if you do.’ I told him what Archie had said. ‘I didn’t care what they did to you,’ I finished. ‘All I cared about was getting Amy back. But Archie seemed to think you deserved our help too. I thought he was wrong.’

  ‘And now?’

  I studied his outline, faint moonlight touching only on the shoulder of his jacket and the side of his head, but his slight stature made him look like a child. He sound like one, too, and I couldn’t reply to his question because I didn’t know the answer. ‘Why did you take Amy?’ I said instead.

  I saw that one shoulder lift in a helpless shrug. ‘I wasn’t thinking,’ he repeated. ‘I had to make you stay there long enough for me to get away. I meant it when I said I’d let her go. I thought you’d believe me.’

  Believe him? ‘So why didn’t you?’ The ache to get back to the farm, to Archie, was still pulsing in me, but I needed to play Nathan’s line very carefully or he’d wriggle off my hook and be gone.

  ‘I got to the top of the lane, and tried to make her get down off the cart, but she wouldn’t. So I lifted her down, and told her
to run back home.’

  ‘You used those words? “Run home?” ’

  ‘Well, yes—’

  ‘Nathan, if you’d spent any time around her at all, instead of locking yourself away in your room, you’d know she has no idea what a home is.’ Amy must have heard the sadness in my voice, and I felt the solid movement of her head, twisting against my chest to look up at me.

  ‘Kitty cryin’?’

  ‘No, darling, it’s all right.’ I bent and kissed her forehead, and she went back to her work, satisfied. ‘So, she wouldn’t run back down the lane,’ I prompted Nathan.

  ‘I couldn’t make her move,’ he said. ‘She just stood there. I started to move off up the road, thinking it might make her go back ho…somewhere more familiar. But she started following me instead, and I didn’t like to think of her on the road alone.’

  I didn’t know whether to slap him or hug him; he’d been desperate, terrified for his life, making worse and worse decisions every step of the way, and yet he had still been moved to risk everything to protect this child he barely knew. Yes, Nathan was a rogue, but he didn’t deserve to die.

  ‘Archie was right,’ I said gently. He sniffed, and the part of me that felt sorry for him grew a little bigger, edging aside the anger and frustration. ‘Will you come back to the farm? Just long enough for me to get you the money,’ I hurried on, as he started to shift backwards—an instinctively defensive movement that took him farther into the darkest part of the stable.

  ‘You were telling the truth?’ he said, his voice taking on a hopeful note.

  ‘For once, yes.’

  He came closer again. ‘Why didn’t you say something when we were in the barn?’ He didn’t sound suspicious, more pleading, and I shrugged but my voice was dry and somewhat unforgiving when I answered.

  ‘I have asked myself that very same question. I believe I might have been slightly distracted by the fact that you had just stabbed my husband.’ A silence fell, and as the seconds slipped away I felt the urgency to leave like a painful tug in my chest. ‘Will you come?’ I said, when the wait became too much.

  He stirred from whatever thoughts had him in their grip. ‘Yes, I’ll come.’

  ‘Good. The trap is still at the station.’ I eased Amy off my lap and stood up, then held out my hand to her. ‘Come along, sweetheart, we’re going to see Mister Archie now.’

  ‘I’s tired,’ she said. ‘Can’t walk no more.’

  ‘Let me carry her.’ Nathan moved towards her, and I had to stop myself from snatching her up into my own arms. But while he might not be very strong, and the wheezing sounds he made reminded me he needed to be careful of exerting himself, he was still stronger than me. When Amy didn’t balk at his approach, but lifted her arms to be carried, I let myself relax.

  As we started back up the road to the station Nathan glanced behind us. ‘I was going to leave her there, as soon as dawn came,’ he said quietly. ‘She would have been asleep, and Seth Pearce, or one of his lads, would have found her and brought her back to you.’

  ‘She’d have been comfortable, yes,’ I allowed, brushing sawdust from my trousers. ‘But what you did, Nathan—’

  ‘I know.’

  Pippin had begun to pull at his harness when we reached him. Guilt niggled at me for leaving him for so long, and I murmured my apologies and unhitched the long rein from the fence. As we rolled along the dark road, Pippin picking his way carefully back towards Dark River Farm, Nathan asked what had clearly been on his mind since he’d learned I’d been telling the truth about the money.

  ‘How much did the girls give you for Amy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to accept it, and now it feels wrong to sit and count it. I was going to take it to the bank tomorrow.’

  ‘Then how do you know it’ll be enough?’

  ‘How much do you owe?’ He didn’t answer at first, and I slowed Pippin until we were barely moving. ‘How much, Nathan?’

  ‘Seven hundred pounds.’

  I snatched a horrified breath. ‘Seven hundred? How on earth did you borrow so much?’

  ‘I didn’t. I borrowed one hundred and twelve. Almost enough to pay Will back, but not quite. Then…’ He trailed away again, and I remembered what Archie had said about paying back so much more than the original loan. Still…seven hundred?

  ‘Then what? Come on, you might as well tell me everything.’

  ‘Then I found a job as a chauffeur. A businessman with an appreciation for art, which is why he took me on despite my lack of experience. I thought I would be able to pay back the loan, but it kept growing, faster than I could earn. They found me, those who’d set up the loan, and offered to remove the responsibility of cutting my fingernails, one by one, unless I made a substantial payment by the end of the week.’ He flexed his fingers. ‘As an artist, I felt compelled to accept their terms.’

  Despite the wry humour in his words, I shuddered, with no small degree of sympathy. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I stole the money from my employer.’ He said it in a small voice, so unlike the confident, cheerful Nathan I’d first met. I had to remind myself it was the same man. He cleared his throat, and carried on, in matter-of-fact tones. ‘Unfortunately I didn’t do it very well, and I was caught, convicted and imprisoned. The debt mounted up while I was in Walton Gaol, and by the time I came out, complete with pneumonia—’ he thumped his chest ‘—I owed just over four hundred pounds.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘In July of 1915. Two months later I heard about Will, how he’d married into money, and so I went back to Breckenhall. That was the day I met Evie, in Will’s old shop.’

  ‘And Martin told you where Will was living,’ I finished.

  ‘Yes, and that he was wounded, but not how badly. I would never have—’

  ‘Yes, you would,’ I said. ‘Of course you would. In your position you’d have been a fool not to try.’ Something else puzzled me. ‘How did you know to get talking to Belinda in the bank?’

  He leaned down and patted the side of the trap, where the name of the farm was painted. ‘This was waiting in the street. The only people I saw in the bank were two old men, a very fat nursemaid, a woman with three children in tow, and a pretty young woman in trousers and boots. It wasn’t hard to make the connection.’

  ‘Poor Bel,’ I murmured. ‘Go on.’

  ‘When I settled into Dark River, it felt like the safest place in the world,’ he said. ‘I thought, I can stay here, make a new life. No-one would ever find me. Then I got talking to Archie out in the fields. I’d never seen him really angry, not like this. He told me if I brought violence to Dark River he’d…’ He broke off.

  ‘He’d what?’ I said, intrigued to hear of this new, harder side, especially since he’d been the one to send me after Nathan to try and save him.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Wasn’t very nice though. Anyway, I remembered how easy it had been for me to get Martin to trust me, so it would probably be even easier for them.’

  ‘It was easy to trick him by friendliness, because he’s a gentle soul,’ I said. ‘But he’s also loyal; he might not give in so easily to intimidation.’

  ‘No,’ Nathan said, ‘but would you want to be the reason he was in that position?’

  Once again I felt the complication of combined anger and affection. ‘You’re a waste of a very nice man,’ I said at last.

  He gave a little laugh. ‘Pretty Kitty…what on earth do you see in that tall, strong and handsome Scotsman, when you could have me?’

  I laughed too, and it felt surprisingly good. ‘It was a hard choice,’ I said, and nudged his arm. ‘But you make a very nice friend when you forget to be such an arrogant oik.’

  He remembered something then, and sat up straight. ‘Did you call him your husband?’

  ‘I did,’ I said, pride unfurling inside me. ‘We’re handfasted.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said softly. ‘Really, I am. You’re made for each other.’
/>   ‘And what of Belinda?’ I asked.

  ‘I like her. I thought perhaps there might be something there for us, until I saw Evie and Will, and then you and Archie.’ He fetched a deep sigh, and shrugged. ‘I want what you have, or nothing at all. What would be the point in settling for less?’

  We had reached the top of the lane now, and as I turned Pippin down it I realised I had almost forgotten everything that Nathan had done, but his mention of Archie brought it all vividly back again. I became once more aware of my shirt, stiff with Archie’s blood, and of the pain in my hands where the reins cut into the sore spots and blisters. With Amy safely in the back of the cart, and home growing closer with every turn of the wheels, it had been easy to let my mind release the fear that had consumed it throughout the night. But now it returned; what if the money was not enough to tempt him to exchange it for the diamond? After everything that had been risked for it, everything that had nearly been lost… Evie hated the thing, but it was no longer hers to hate, and it was Lily we had to think of now. If only Evie hadn’t already sent that blessed telegram…

  ‘Leave the cart here,’ Nathan said, interrupting my thoughts. ‘We’ll walk the rest of the way.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No-one else must know we’re back. Those who know what’s happened will be awake, and waiting for you to come back.’

  ‘And what if they hear us? The money’s up in my room.’

  ‘They won’t. Amy won’t make a sound, and if someone’s in the kitchen you’ll just have to think of an excuse to go straight to your room.’