The August sun was already hot as he rode out of the yard, directing the horse through an ivy-covered arch and along by a tall wall covered with roses in full bloom. The scent of the flowers was heavy in the still air; on the other side of the wall his mother’s pleasure gardens would be a picture. By the time he left the grounds of the house and turned into the cobbled lane leading to the farm, the claustrophobia his parents’ home always induced was falling from him.
The sky was a deep blue, but billowing white clouds drifted aimlessly across the fields, a gentle reminder of the weather’s capacity to flatten the crops. Years ago, Tollett had told him England had one of the best climates for growing crops but one of the worst for harvesting them, and he had never forgotten those words of wisdom. The corn-fields stretching in front of him made him stop for a moment, his gaze relishing the vivid golden sea of grain. A kestrel, rigidly suspended in the still air and motionless save for its quivering wingtips, was scanning the ground in search of prey. As he watched, it swooped into the corn, only to emerge again grasping something in its talons as it returned to the sky. Tollett had taught him that these birds were useful allies of the farmer, catching many rodents and insects, but he preferred the songbirds to the russet-flecked predator, magnificent though the birds of prey were.
The lane ended where a copse began and he continued through the small wood and into a meadow which had been left to the riot of wild flowers that starred the thick grass for as long as he could remember. Beyond this he joined a dirt road. At one end of this the farm could be seen in the distance, a big old sprawling farmhouse where Tollett and his wife and family lived. At the back of the farmyard stretched the labourers’ terraced cottages, and behind them lay the fields containing the livestock. The other end of the road veered sharply away from the grounds of his parents’ house, eventually leading to a road that went to Newcastle. This meant that no trace of the farm, or its noises and smells, intruded on his parents’ house and immaculate grounds.
Tollett was in his study working on the farm accounts when Christopher arrived at the farmhouse, flustering Mrs Tollett and exciting her little brood of children who were off school for the summer. As she bade him sit in the pleasant, oak-beamed sitting room, the children peeped round the door at him, giggling and whispering until their mother shooed them away. ‘We don’t get many visitors to the house,’ she apologised in her warm Northern drawl, immediately adding, ‘ee, Mr Christopher, I didn’t mean you’re a visitor, not as such – not being the master’s son.’
‘It’s all right, Mrs Tollett. I knew what you meant.’ He smiled to put her at her ease but the woman was all a-flutter, and they were both glad when Wilbert appeared in the next moment, hastily doing up the buttons of his cloth jacket.
‘I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know you were coming this morning.’ He held out his hand and Christopher shook it. ‘Nowt wrong, is there?’
‘Not that I know of, Mr Tollett.’ He always gave the man the courtesy of the ‘Mr’ as befitted his responsible position, although his father and brother never did. ‘My father suggested I might come and see how things are, but to tell you the truth I was planning to come anyway, just to get away from the house.’ He smiled. He’d known Tollett all his life and the man had spent many days allowing him to tag behind him about the farm when he’d been a child. As he had grown, he had felt the two of them had become friends. He hoped Tollett thought so too, although he knew Wilbert would never presume to claim this out loud.
The manager’s face relaxed and he smiled back. ‘Walls pressing in on you already, sir?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Then a ride in the fresh air’ll be just what the doctor ordered.’ Wilbert paused. ‘The wife was just about to make some coffee when you came. Can I tempt you to a cup and a slice of her fruitcake?’ This was said with an element of pride. The drinking of coffee denoted the manager’s station in life, and elevated him above the men working under him.
‘Sounds good to me.’ Suddenly Christopher felt hungry.
They chatted about his life at Oxford and how the farm was doing while they ate, and then the two of them left the farmhouse, Christopher sending Mrs Tollett into a further tizzy when he complimented her on the fruitcake and declared it was the best he’d tasted since he’d been here the last time. ‘I’d like to take a couple back with me when I leave, if that’s all right?’ he said to the pink-faced little woman. ‘There’s nothing like your baking, Mrs Tollett.’
It was as they mounted their horses that Wilbert said, and warmly, ‘It’s good to have you back, Mr Christopher, and you haven’t changed a bit in spite of being down at that grand university and all.’
Christopher raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Did you expect me to?’
‘I don’t rightly know, sir, but there’s many who might have. Hobnobbing with lords and ladies and the cream of the crop.’
‘If you looked into the ancestors of the “cream of the crop”, as you put it, there’s more villains and rogues than they’d like to admit to,’ Christopher said drily. ‘Not to mention a few murderers and torturers for good measure.’
‘Oh aye, you’re right there, sir. And not too far back in history neither.’
Their talk was easy as befitted old friends as they began a leisurely tour of the farm. The pigsties were full of little piglets squealing and clambering over each other, and big fat contented sows lying on their side as their offspring fought each other for the exposed teats. The hen coops were producing more and more eggs each year; the vast open area the wooden coops led on to was full of happy hens busily scratching about in the dirt and clumps of grass.
The two men sat chatting for some time as they watched the cattle lazily ambling about in the livestock fields beyond the buildings close to the farmhouse. It was a hot, sultry day, and as Christopher listened to the manager detailing the facts and figures and the profit the farm had made in the first half-year, he knew he wouldn’t remember anything Wilbert had said later. He was at peace, a rare occurrence when at home and one almost always confined to moments such as these when he was with Wilbert or riding Jet in the surrounding countryside.
Where was he going to fit in to the overall scheme of things, once his time at Oxford was done?
The thought was an unwelcome intrusion, spoiling the moment and bringing his parents’ world into the tranquil scene in front of him. Was he destined to marry Adelaide and become one of the privileged country set? All hail fellow and well met? And Nathaniel. The only way his brother could stomach being wed to Rowena would be if he had a mistress or two in the wings, supplying his carnal needs. Was this it? Was this the sum total of the future?
‘. . . tidy, respectable folk, none of your riff-raff. They might snare a few rabbits and take the odd pheasant or two, but they’re an honest lot.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Tollett.’ Too late, Christopher realised he’d been miles away. ‘What were you saying?’
‘I was explaining about the gypsies I’ve hired to help out with the haymaking, sir. They’re the same ones who sell the horses to us each year, and I can vouch for ’em else I’d never have took them on.’
‘I’m sure you wouldn’t.’
‘The thing is, sir, this good weather is going to break soon, I feel it in me bones, and them gypsies work like the devil. They show our lads up, I can tell you. They’re camping where they usually do, up by Lot’s Burn, and seeing as they were around I thought I might as well use ’em, but . . .’ Wilbert hesitated. ‘I haven’t mentioned it to your father, Mr Christopher.’
Christopher nodded. Wilbert didn’t need to explain further. His grandfather Armstrong had been nothing more than a shopkeeper who had been successful enough to buy a string of shops before he struck lucky with his gambling and won the estate, but this was never mentioned at home. To hear his parents talk you’d think the Armstrongs had always had blue blood, and his father was worse than his mother in this regard. Oswald seemed to think it necessary to show he had a contem
pt for the working class as though this somehow reinforced his superior position, and on the subjects of minorities like the gypsies or the Irish or indeed any person who wasn’t English upper-class, he was scathing.
‘There was no need to mention it, Mr Tollett.’ They both knew his father and Nathaniel only visited the farm once in a blue moon. ‘My father leaves the employment of seasonal labour in your hands and is only interested in a job well done.’
‘Oh, it’ll be that, sir. Like I said, them gypsies work like the dickens, their womenfolk too. Very comely some of ’em are an’ all, very comely, but there’s never no trouble with our lads, their menfolk see to that. They’re not ones for mixing, the Romanies. Sell you their horses, oh yes, and the womenfolk their posies and baskets and such, but by and large they keep themselves to themselves and their noses clean.’
‘You sound as though you approve of them.’
‘Aye, well I do, sir, to be truthful. There’s some tinkers and pedlars who give the whole lot of ’em a bad name, but this particular group are a pleasure to deal with, compared to some of the scum in the town. I’m not a one for towns, never have been.’
They had left the livestock fields and followed the winding path in the direction of the acres of ripe golden wheat as they had been talking, and now, as the horses took them closer, they could hear in the distance a song being chanted in the motionless corn. Christopher brought Jet to a halt, straining his ears. ‘That’s not English, is it?’
‘No, sir. That’s the gypsies singing; they sing all day and in their own language most of the time. I like it meself, but some of our lads say it gives ’em the willies. Mind, they don’t like the gypsies showing ’em up workwise.’
They passed several fields where the sheaves were already stacked and ripening in the blazing sun before coming to the area where the reapers were at work. The farm hands were working in one field, the gypsies and their womenfolk in another.
Christopher did not comment on this. What he did say was, ‘I remember a day when you let me help out with the harvesting, Mr Tollett. Do you? I was ten years old at the time.’
Wilbert nodded. ‘I do, sir. The sun turned you as red as a beetroot but you wouldn’t stop work till the men did.’
‘I told my mother I’d been reading by the lake all day and I still got into trouble for that. What she would have said if she knew I’d been haymaking, I don’t know.’
‘If your parents had known half of what you got up to we’d both have been in trouble, sir.’
The two smiled at each other before sitting back on their mounts and letting their gaze wander across the working men and women. A golden haze hung in the air, the sickles of the reapers moving rhythmically and the Romany chant rising and falling in the still air. Christopher breathed in the evocative scent of cut corn. It was better than any manufactured perfume.
He watched a group of gypsy women gathering the corn and deftly binding it into sheaves, their faces and arms nut brown and their bright blouses splashes of colour against the acres of gold. Most of them were bare headed, their blue-black hair shining in the sun. One of the women, a young girl, was wearing a large floppy straw hat that hid her face, and for no other reason than that the hat made her different, his gaze focused on her. As it did so she straightened, flexing her slender shoulders. Her back towards him, she took off her hat and held her face up to the sun for a moment, a mass of thick, luxuriant dark-brown hair with glossy chestnut highlights falling about her shoulders.
Christopher’s breath caught in his throat. His eyes glued to the figure, which seemed almost ethereal compared to the other gypsy girls, he watched her run her fingers through her hair several times. Then she wound it up and piled it on her head again, before stuffing her hat on and continuing with her work.
Letting out his breath in a silent sigh, he said, ‘That girl, the one with the hat on. She’s one of the gypsies?’
‘As far as I know, sir.’ Wilbert’s gaze had moved behind Christopher to the farm buildings in the distance. ‘It’s the men’s lunchtime – here comes the wife with their victuals.’
Christopher turned in the saddle to look to where Mrs Tollett and some of the other women and children were coming laden with baskets. He recalled the year he’d helped with the harvest: the bottles of cold tea and huge slabs of sticky fruitcake and ham and egg pie had seemed like the best feast he’d ever had. They still did, come to it.
‘I want a word with the men, sir. Will you wait here, and then you’re welcome to come back to the house and share our meal?’
Christopher nodded. ‘Go ahead and thanks, I’d like that if it’s no trouble for Mrs Tollett.’
‘Oh, she’ll be tickled pink and so will the bairns.’
Christopher watched Mrs Tollett approach and as he did so he reflected that Wilbert was a lucky man. As a young boy he had enjoyed the times he had sneaked away to visit the manager’s home. There had always been plenty of children to play with; Wilbert’s oldest son was twenty-nine now and the Tolletts had fifteen children in all, the youngest having been born six years ago. But it wasn’t this which had drawn him but the tangible atmosphere of warmth and laughter prevalent in the home.
From the beginning he’d sensed something between husband and wife he hadn’t been able to define as a child, never having witnessed love and friendship between a married couple before. He’d always left the farmhouse on leaden feet, wishing with all his heart he’d been born a Tollett as he’d walked back to his own home. He’d made the mistake of saying this to Nathaniel once. His brother had laughed at him, teasing him about it for weeks. He hadn’t mentioned the subject of the Tolletts to Nathaniel again, but the incident had brought home the fact that, much as he loved Nathaniel and his brother loved him, they were fundamentally different. It had made him feel even more of an outsider within his home.
His gaze returning to the gypsies, he saw they’d followed the farm hands’ lead and were now sitting down in small groups eating their lunch. One or two of the girls had poppies threaded in their dark hair. He’d picked a bunch of poppies on his way to the Tolletts’ once as a child, and although Mrs Tollett had taken them with a word of thanks, one of her children, a pert young miss called Gladys who’d been a year younger than him, had told him he shouldn’t have done it.
‘The poppy’s the protector of the crop, isn’t it, Mam?’ she’d said to her mother. ‘Da says the poppies grow to make the Corn Goddess sleep so she doesn’t wander and forget to grow the wheat. If you pick them before harvest you’ll bring down thunder and rain and flatten the crop. That’s what Da told us.’
Mrs Tollett had shushed her precocious daughter and told him it didn’t matter, but he’d later discovered that all the country folk thought the same. The following week had seen several violent thunderstorms and he had never picked the poppies again. Gladys had married the son of a local farmer at sixteen and was happily bossing him about and having a child every twelve months, according to her father.
A slight smile on his lips, Christopher came out of his reverie to find he was staring at the girl in the straw hat and she was staring back at him. He blinked, and the brim of the hat swiftly lowered, hiding her gaze, but not before he’d seen two great azure eyes set in a heart-shaped face, the beauty of which took his breath away for the second time that day.
Who was he? Pearl was glad of the hat to hide her burning cheeks. A gentleman, obviously, from his clothes and manner. And she had been staring at him. She bit into a piece of flatbread, mortified at her forwardness. It had been obvious he’d been miles away, lost in thought, and there she’d been gawping at him like a hussy.
It was another few minutes before she dared to raise her head and then it was to see Mr Tollett, the manager, and the young gentleman riding away. Her eyes followed them until they disappeared from view. The gentleman hadn’t been wearing a hat. That alone denoted his class. His hair had been beautiful, golden, like ripe wheat or perhaps just a shade or two darker. Beautiful, anyway. He had b
een beautiful.
Her thoughts again made her lower her head in embarrassment and she was thankful none of the girls around her could read her mind. Who was he? she asked herself again. Someone important from the way Mr Tollett had acted. Anyway, it was none of her business.
She continued to tell herself this throughout the rest of the day as she worked in the fields, but still her mind kept returning to the handsome stranger. Every little while she found her eyes scanning the distance to catch a sight of him, but although Mr Tollett returned late afternoon, he was alone.
The twilight was deepening rapidly when she arrived back at the campsite with the others. Most of the able-bodied among them had gone to help with the harvest, but Byron and his father and a couple of the other men had ridden up the coast after hearing about a horse fair further north. They were expecting to be away for a few days.
Corinda had taken on the task of cooking the evening meal for as long as the harvesting continued, but Pearl found she wasn’t hungry. She felt odd, restless – and when Halimena made a show of complimenting her daughter-in-law on the dinner, adding that it was the best food she had tasted in a long time, Pearl found she couldn’t ignore the old woman’s scarcely veiled hostility as she usually did. After saying she was going to bed and leaving the others, she suddenly balked at the thought of the hot stuffy caravan and decided to go for a walk instead, slipping silently away. This in itself was a rare treat, and something she wouldn’t have been able to do if Byron had been around. To be fair, she qualified in her mind, none of the gypsy girls were allowed to wander far without a male escort from their family accompanying them.
The daylight had all but gone as she strode along the lane leading away from Lot’s Burn. She had thought she was tired on the walk back to the campsite, in fact she had wanted nothing more than something to drink and her bed, but now she felt invigorated, even exhilarated at walking alone in the cool of the late evening. A missel thrush, its beak holding the last meal of the day for its fledglings, flew past her – and in the distance she could hear cows mooing as they settled for the night. Somewhere in the near hills a fox barked. She breathed in the air, warm and holding a hundred summer scents, and suddenly took off at a run, leaping over a low stone wall as she laughed out loud and crossing a meadow of thick grass on feet that seemed to have wings.
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