‘We can’t get to her room without passing him.’ Her eyes drifted to the shards of the broken plate. ‘Tilly … might he be dangerous?’
‘I honestly don’t know. When he’s awake he wouldn’t hurt a fly, but if he believes he’s back in the trenches …’
Edie squeezed Tilly’s hand and let it drop. ‘I’ll go.’
‘Edie, no! Let me. He’s known me longer.’
‘You can’t risk it. You’ve got the baby to think of.’ She lifted her chin. ‘It’s all right. I’m not afraid.’
Tilly opened her mouth to remonstrate, but at that moment Prue saved them further discussion by appearing at the door of her room. Her dark hair flowed over her nightgown, and Edie couldn’t help noticing how much younger she looked without the harsh bun she usually wore.
‘Girls, don’t move!’ she called in a reassuringly no-nonsense voice. ‘Stay right where you are.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Edie asked. ‘Ought we to telephone for a policeman or … or a doctor or something?’
‘Oh, nonsense, we don’t need any of that. It’s only Jack.’
She approached and crouched down beside him, resting a gentle hand on his shoulder. Jack jerked as if he’d been shot, his strong, powerful body trembling all over.
‘My God, Prue, please be careful,’ Tilly muttered.
‘They’re here,’ Jack said, fixing wild eyes on Prue. ‘They’re here, they’re … they’re bloody everywhere! We’ll never get out, Wagstaff.’
‘It’s me, Jack,’ she said softly, massaging his shoulder. ‘It’s Cheggy. You’re safe, my love.’
‘Cheggy …’ His eyes unclouded slightly, and he fixed them on her. ‘They’re … Do you see them too?’
‘I only see Jack Graham in his pyjamas, and two very frightened young ladies. Not to mention the remains of Albert’s mother’s second-best dinner service.’
‘Wagstaff and the other boys … did they make it?’
‘No,’ she said, bowing her head. ‘But that was a long time ago. You were dreaming, Jack. We’re at Applefield Manor. The war – that war – is over.’
‘Then it’s … it’s really you.’ He seemed to be coming out of the trance now. ‘Cheggy …’ He laughed: a hollow, desperate sound. ‘I used to think I saw you. Used to dream … dream of home. And you. I thought when it was all over, I could come home and I’d be safe again.’
‘You are home. You are safe.’
He looked behind him, straight at Edie, and she instinctively recoiled when she met his eyes. The look of raw, brutish pain in them was unbearable. Like an animal caught in a trap, its eyes begging for the relief of death.
‘No,’ he whispered to Prue, bringing his lips close to her ear. ‘I brought the horrors back with me.’
‘We’ll face our horrors together, as we did when we were children.’ She stretched out a hand to him. ‘I’ll keep you safe.’
He looked up to meet her eyes, his lips forming a tremulous smile as with childlike trust he put his huge hand into her little one.
‘Go back to bed now,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll sit by you until you’re calm again.’
‘Yes. Yes. Sorry, Cheg.’ The dream had fled completely now, and he looked at the two girls as Prue helped him to his feet. ‘Sorry, ladies.’
Edie exchanged a look with Tilly. ‘Um, don’t mention it,’ was all she could think of to say. They watched as Prue took Jack by the arm and guided the stooped, broken figure to his room.
Chapter 12
Tilly was making porridge when Edie rose next morning, although usually she left a cold breakfast ready on the days Edie worked at the farm.
‘You’re up early,’ Edie said.
‘Yes, I couldn’t get back to sleep after Jack woke us up. In the end I thought I might as well get up and do something useful.’ She watched Edie rubbing her eyes. ‘You look like I feel, love.’
‘Thank goodness it’s Saturday and I’ve got the afternoon off,’ Edie said with a yawn. ‘I’m not sure I could manage another twelve-hour day clipping out the wedder gimmers, or whatever one of the million terms they have for sheep around here is the correct one.’
Tilly laughed. ‘Well, it’s not that one. If there was such a thing as a wedder gimmer, it would be a castrated female. Which I’m sure even an unworldly soul like you must realise is somewhat impossible, Edie.’
‘Oh.’
‘How were you thinking of spending your free afternoon?’
‘I had planned to go into Applefield and look around, but the way I feel this morning, I may just go back to bed.’
‘Why not come help me spend the housekeeping? It’ll be nice to have someone to keep me company in the queues, and I can show you what little there is to see in the village. You’ll still have plenty of time to get ready for your dance.’
Edie groaned. ‘I’d forgotten the dance. I wish I could think of an excuse not to go.’
‘Oh, you’ll have buckets of fun.’ Tilly came over with a bowl of porridge. ‘There you are, that’ll warm your bones.’
‘Are Jack and Prue up yet?’ Edie asked as she added a spoonful of treacle.
‘I don’t think so.’ Tilly took a seat and poured Edie and herself a mug of tea from the pot. ‘You won’t say anything to him, will you? He’ll be so humiliated if you mention it.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it. The poor man, it must be horrific having to relive it over and over.’ Edie thought back to the evening before: the wild, helpless look in Jack’s eyes, and the way Prue had calmed him with a maternal tenderness Edie would never have expected in her. ‘Why does he call her Cheggy, Till?’
‘No idea. He has done for as long as I’ve known the two of them – all my life, in other words. I’ve always wondered but I never liked to ask.’
‘What is their story? She doesn’t treat him like he’s just the gardener.’
‘Because he isn’t just the gardener,’ Tilly said, reaching for the milk jug. ‘Prue and Jack have known each other since they were children.’
‘Did they both live in the village?’
‘They lived right here at Applefield Manor. Jack’s father was the gardener before him, and Prue’s mam was the housekeeper. A real dragon, from what I’ve heard. I don’t think Prue has many happy memories of her. Free with her hands – and her fists.’
‘So they grew up together?’
‘That’s right, alongside Albert Hewitt: the young master, as it were. The three of them were the bosomest of pals. All of an age and thick as thieves, with parents who didn’t care enough to mind where in the grounds their children were so long as they never had to set eyes on them – well, apart from old Mr Graham, perhaps. Jack always speaks fondly of him.’ She paused to sip her tea. ‘From what Jack’s told me, I think Prue might have been rather wild when her mother wasn’t around to check her. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?’
‘And Albert and Prue fell in love?’
‘Yes.’ Tilly laughed. ‘That’s the price his toffee-nosed parents paid for letting him fraternise with the domestics’ children. They were mortified when he announced he was going to marry the housekeeper’s daughter. I think they’d have liked to cut him off with nothing, but there was some legal reason they weren’t allowed. Albert and Prue married as soon as they were of age, and eventually Applefield Manor became theirs.’
‘Gosh. It’s like a fairytale,’ Edie said in a half-whisper.
Tilly smiled. ‘I hate to shatter your girlish faith in the power of true love, Edie, but the real world rarely works the way it does in a storybook.’
‘You mean they weren’t happy?’
‘Oh yes, they loved each other deeply. I think if Prue hadn’t adored Albert quite so much then by now Jack might’ve –’ She stopped herself. ‘But it’s not my business to talk about that. What I mean is, a happily-ever-after nearly always comes at a price.’
‘What price?’
‘Suspicion. Judgement. Applefield is good at that, I can testify to it myself. Prue
had married outside her class, and people don’t like it when they see others not keeping to their place. It makes a mockery of what they see as The Rules.’
‘But if she loved him …’
‘She did. Anyone who saw them together could tell that Prudence and Albert Hewitt thought the world of each other, but it didn’t stop the gossip. Whispers that she was a fortune-hunter, that she and her mother had concocted the plan to “trap” Albert when Prue was just a child. All sorts of nonsense. Then after her marriage Prue found she was neither one thing nor the other: despised by the class she was born into for thinking she was above it, sneered at by the one she married into because she wasn’t truly one of them. I imagine Cinderella had a very similar experience.’
‘Is that why Prue closes herself off the way she does? Why she hates to have strangers in the house?’
‘I believe that’s part of it,’ Tilly said. ‘She finds it very hard to let people in. Prue loves and trusts only two people in the world now Albert’s gone: Bertie, her son, and Jack, her oldest friend. And I think she’s come to trust me in the five months I’ve worked for her – I hope so.’
‘So you and Jack are her two lost causes then?’ Edie said, smiling.
‘That’s what I’ve always thought. Jack with his little problem, me with mine.’ She rested a hand on her stomach. ‘Outcasts, like her. People who don’t fit any more.’
‘People who are alone,’ Edie murmured. ‘Like me.’ She roused herself. ‘I’d better go to work. Tell Prue and Jack I said good morning.’
‘Wait,’ Tilly said before Edie could leave.
‘What is it?’
‘Can you take a note up to the farm? It’ll save me the price of a stamp.’
‘Of course.’
Tilly took a pretty lilac envelope from under the trivet. It was sealed, but there was no name or address on it. Edie took it, noting that it was scented with lavender water.
‘Pass it on to Sam, he’ll know what it’s for,’ Tilly said.
‘What is it for?’
‘Nothing important. Just business.’
Edie raised an eyebrow. ‘That sounds mysterious.’
Tilly laughed. ‘It isn’t, I promise. If you must know, Sam goes rabbit-shooting on Saturday afternoons and I’m hoping to sweet-talk him into selling me one for our pot. Can you give it to him?’
‘Oh. Yes, of course. Bye then.’
Edie knew the route to Larkstone Farm now, and she arrived at work with time to spare. She didn’t want to give Sam any reason to withdraw the good opinion – or at least the tolerant opinion – he’d formed of her on her first couple of days. The workers were in the farmhouse when she arrived, being assigned their daily jobs, and Edie took her place among them.
On the stone-flagged floor, beside a roaring fire, was a wooden crate containing a tiny sleeping lamb. Its little chest rose and fell with a weak but steady rhythm, and Sadie and the other sheepdog, Shep, kept watchful eyes on it from their station under a big oak table.
A paraffin lamp sat on the table, set beside a tin mug half-filled with cold cocoa and what must have been Sam’s suppertime reading: a copy of The Farmer and Stock-Breeder sprawling incongruously beside a well-thumbed edition of Mr Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. A couple of pheasants and a hare were strung from the rafters alongside pans and copper kettles, and a long shelf filled with home remedies for a variety of sheep ailments ran the circumference of the room. Although there was no electricity in the farmhouse, there was a battered Bakelite wireless sitting in one corner, the type powered by a rechargeable accumulator. That and a well-stuffed bookshelf were the only luxuries in this otherwise spartan example of rustic living.
‘You two, infirmary, do the morning feeds,’ Sam was saying to Vinnie and Barbara, with his customary lack of courtesy.
‘Yes, Sam.’
Sam was as sullen as ever, but Edie couldn’t help noticing that he seemed a lot less fresh than he had on the previous two days. His face was haggard, and his eyes bagged with purple. She wondered if it had been an unsettled night for some of the in-lamb Herdies.
‘Luca, Marco, I’d like you doing the feeds up at the pens please, then you can help the girls fettle the infirmary,’ Sam said to the two Italians. ‘Take the boy.’
Luca saluted. ‘Yes, boss.’
Davy shot a scowl of deep suspicion at the two prisoners and opened his mouth to object, but Sam raised a hand to silence him. ‘I know what you’re going to say. Do as you’re told or you’re out, lad. I won’t brook surliness, or workers who can’t be fashed getting their hands dirty.’
‘I don’t mind getting my hands dirty,’ Davy muttered.
‘Well, then is it obeying orders you object to? You might find that’s a problem for you in the army.’
‘What would you know about it?’ Davy mumbled, only half under his breath. Sam shot him a sharp look.
‘Son, this is your last warning: belt up or you can bugger off. This is my place. If you don’t like the terms of your employment here, you’re welcome to find somewhere else.’
Davy looked like he had a retort on the tip of his tongue, but something in the farmer’s expression seemed to stop him.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Whatever you like.’
‘That’s better. And mind what Luca and Marco tell you; they’re in charge.’ Sam finally turned to look at Edie. ‘London, you’re with me.’
‘All right.’
Hmm. So they were to be alone again. Edie had been convinced that Sam had no romantic interest in her, but he did seem fond of singling her out as his working companion. She could see her fellow Land Girls exchanging raised eyebrows.
Sam clapped his hands. ‘Sharp as you like then. Sadie, Shep, here! I’ll be needing you two this morning.’
So they’d at least have the dogs as chaperones. Edie wasn’t sure they’d be much help in the event of any unwanted attention from her boss, but it was better than nothing.
The two sheepdogs came trotting to Sam’s heels. He strode to the door, and Edie was about to follow when Vinnie plucked her elbow.
‘You’re still coming to our beano tonight, aren’t you?’ she asked.
‘Of course.’
Vinnie slapped her on the back. ‘Good girl. I can’t wait to introduce you to the others.’
Edie’s eyes flickered to the door. ‘Do you two know what’s the matter with Sam? He looks worn out.’
Vinnie nodded to the lamb by the fire. ‘He was up till God knows what hour with this little chap. It was at death’s door yesterday evening; he spent most of the night trying to get it out of the woods. Marco says he found him with it cuddled in his arms by the fire this morning, sleeping like a cherub. Do not tell Sam I told you that.’
Barbara, standing at Vinnie’s side with one arm resting on her friend’s shoulder, quirked a knowing eyebrow. ‘You certainly seem to have gained yourself an admirer, Edie.’
Edie flushed. ‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Am I? You’ve only worked here two days and already Sam won’t let you out of his sight. It’s been a while since he had a favourite.’
‘Nothing happened between you two yesterday, did it?’ Vinnie asked.
‘Such as?’
‘Come on, Edie. You can’t be as green as all that.’
Edie felt her cheeks burning again and faked a cough so she had an excuse to cover her face with her handkerchief.
‘It isn’t like that,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the most to learn, that’s all. I expect Sam wants to make sure I’m getting all the training I need.’
Barbara shot a look at the door and lowered her voice. ‘Just be careful, love. Things didn’t turn out too well for Sam’s last pet.’
‘What do you –’
‘London!’ a voice boomed from outside. ‘You coming, lass? Less laik, more work.’
Barbara patted her arm. ‘TTFN, darling. We’ll see you tonight.’
‘Yes. OK.’
With a worried look over her shoulder at the
two women, Edie hurried to the door.
‘Sorry,’ she said to Sam, who was waiting outside for her.
‘Never mind sorry, don’t do it. I don’t pay you to chat.’ He pointed towards one of the outbuildings. ‘Job for us in the henhouse. Nest of rats to flush out.’
Edie brightened. Now this had been covered in her training. Finally, something she could do without embarrassing herself!
‘That lamb by the fire, was that the one from Thursday?’ she asked as she half walked, half skipped to keep up with his long strides. ‘The one I found, I mean?’
‘Aye, that’s him. Still clinging on to life, just.’
She looked up to examine Sam’s profile, noting again the bags under his eyes. ‘Did you have a bad night with him?’
‘A long one. I’m used to it. Lambing season, you’re lucky if you get to bed at all for six or seven weeks. When you do, you keep your boots on.’
‘It was kind of you to try to save him.’
He grunted. ‘Nowt of the sort. Don’t want to lose my investment, that’s all.’
Sadie had waddled up to Edie’s leg. Edie reached down to tickle her ears, and the portly dog wagged her tail appreciatively.
‘I thought sheepdogs were supposed to be lithe and sinewy,’ Edie observed.
‘So they are, when they’re not full of more sheepdog.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Pups. Four or five, by my reckoning.’ He nodded to the other sheepdog. ‘Shep here’s a devil. Can’t leave her alone when she’s on heat.’
‘Oh.’ Edie found herself blushing again, and cursed her stupid cheeks. ‘Will you keep them all?’
‘Nay, I’ve no call for five dogs. Plenty of farms round here with good homes for them though.’ He patted Sadie’s rump. ‘She’s not a deal of good for shepherding work when she’s this far gone, but she likes to feel she’s helping.’
‘Oh! I nearly forgot.’ Edie reached into her pocket and took out the lilac envelope. ‘From Tilly. She asked me to give it to you.’
He took it from her, frowning. ‘Tilly?’
‘Tilly Liddell. She used to work for you, didn’t she?’
‘Oh. Yes.’
He stuffed the note in his pocket and carried on walking.
Edie's Home for Orphans Page 11