‘What a pretty picture,’ he said softly. Though she jumped at the sound of his voice from the doorway and her fingers trembled, Eveleen managed to carry on moistening the eggs, inspecting each one for the first sign of a hairline crack that would herald the arrival of a fluffy yellow chick. She closed the incubator carefully, checked that the paraffin lamp at the side was still alight and turned to face him.
‘Master Stephen,’ she said, managing to keep her voice level though her heart leapt at the sight of him. She felt dishevelled in her plain brown skirt, cream blouse and rough hessian apron. She tried to smooth the wild halo of her unruly curls, mortified to think that there might be wisps of straw tangled in her tresses. If only she could have been dressed in her best blue dress and new bonnet, with a parasol to protect her face from the sun. That was the sort of girl Stephen Dunsmore would court, she thought, not some poorly clad milkmaid employed on his father’s farm.
And yet he was here, smiling down at her as he leaned nonchalantly against the door jamb, idly slapping his riding crop against his soft leather boot.
‘So formal, Miss Hardcastle,’ he teased, but his eyes caressed her.
Eveleen thought him the most handsome man she knew. Gently curved eyebrows above blue eyes, a long straight nose, high cheekbones and a chin that was delicately rounded. The early morning sun behind him glinted on his fair hair, the white collar of his shirt gleamed against his lightly tanned skin and the tightly fitting riding jacket outlined strong shoulders. Whenever she saw him, Eveleen would feel the breath leave her body and her limbs tremble.
She glanced out of the barn door but the yard was deserted, except for his horse tethered at the gate. Then, drawing back into the shadows, she whispered, ‘They know. Jimmy saw us yesterday in Bernby Covert.’
Stephen’s laugh was unconcerned. ‘So?’
‘He told Mam and Dad at suppertime last night.’
Stephen’s left eyebrow arched a fraction. He lifted his riding crop and tapped the ivory handle thoughtfully against his lips. ‘Did he, indeed? That was very foolish of him, wasn’t it? I think you’d better warn your dear brother not to tell tales in future.’
‘Warn him?’
For a brief moment, his blue eyes were steely. ‘If he values his job.’
Eveleen’s dark brown eyes widened in alarm. ‘Oh, you wouldn’t?’
Then he was laughing as if it had all been a joke. ‘Of course I wouldn’t, darling. But Jimmy doesn’t know that, does he? And we’ll just have to be more discreet, won’t we?’
Relief flooded through her. He wanted to go on seeing her. He did love her as much as she loved him.
He was reaching out towards her, his fingers almost touching her hair when, from the back door of the farmhouse, her mother’s voice floated across the yard. ‘Eveleen? Eveleen, where are you?’
Stephen let his hand fall and pulled a wry expression. Standing aside for her to pass he murmured, ‘You’d better go.’
As she hurried across the yard, Eveleen was acutely conscious of his gaze following her and knew that her mother had seen him too.
It was not until suppertime that Mary chose to mention Stephen Dunsmore’s visit.
‘He was here this morning,’ she informed her husband in front of both Eveleen and Jimmy. ‘And she’s been less than useless ever since.’
His fork suspended halfway to his mouth, Walter glanced at Eveleen. Slowly, the fork continued its progress then, chewing the mouthful, he appeared to be thinking.
‘And?’ he said at last.
‘He was in the barn with her. Goodness knows how long he’d been there. I only saw him when I called her in to help me fold the sheets.’
‘I told you so,’ Jimmy put in smugly, but for once his mother took no notice of him.
‘Have you anything you want to tell us, Eveleen?’ Walter asked, his face sombre.
Her heart hammering inside her chest, Eveleen swallowed painfully. ‘No, Dad,’ she whispered. ‘There’s nothing to tell. Honestly.’ It was the truth, at least about their meeting that morning.
Walter pushed his plate away, his supper only half eaten, as if his appetite had suddenly deserted him.
Eveleen dropped her gaze, avoiding his. She could no longer meet those loving, anxious eyes knowing how she was deceiving him.
Mary stood up and crashed the plates together, scraping off Walter’s uneaten food on to the topmost plate with swift, angry movements.
Then she leant across the table and wagged her finger in Eveleen’s face. ‘You’d better come to your senses, miss, and be quick about it. You’ve been in a dream all day ever since he was here. You burnt a hole in a sheet doing the ironing. Then I found you sitting idly on the hearthrug gazing into space when you should have been polishing the fender. Now you can take these plates into the scullery and wash them. Don’t forget to put the meat away in the meat-safe and then you’d better get yourself to bed. You’ve an early start in the morning if you’re going to the fat stock market with your father.’ She put her hand on her husband’s shoulder and her tone softened as she added, ‘And you’d better go to your bed, too, Walter dear. You’re looking tired.’
Already Jimmy was sidling towards the door to escape before Mary could send him to bed too.
‘I think I will, love.’ Walter heaved himself up from his chair and, wishing each member of his family goodnight, he hauled himself up the narrow stairs to the bedroom above.
As she washed and dried the dishes and put everything away, Eveleen’s pulse quickened. Stephen often went to the cattle market. Perhaps they would see him. Tomorrow she would wear her best bonnet to ride in the pony and trap to Grantham.
As she returned to the kitchen to say goodnight it was as if her mother, sitting once more with her pillow lace, had read her thoughts.
‘And don’t you be thinking you can wear your Sunday best tomorrow,’ Mary said.
Thankful that the comment made no direct accusations, Eveleen was emboldened to protest. ‘But, Mam, I can’t go to town in my working clothes. What would people think?’
‘Of course I don’t mean you should go looking like a ragamuffin.’ Mary Hardcastle bristled with indignation. ‘But your second-best dress and shawl will be quite serviceable.’ She pursed her mouth primly. ‘I don’t want anyone to think you’re getting ideas above your station.’
A spark of rebellion made Eveleen ask, ‘And what is my “station”, Mam? Because I’d really like to know.’
‘Eveleen! Don’t you dare to answer me back. Now, get to bed and I’ll have to decide whether I even let you go tomorrow.’
‘But, Mam—’
‘Not another word.’ Mary flapped her hand, dismissing her daughter.
Eveleen bit her lip to still an angry response. Her mother knew full well that one of the harshest punishments she could inflict upon her daughter was to stop her weekly trip into town with her father. Silently she left the kitchen to the sound of her mother’s mutterings about ungrateful children and climbed the stairs.
Sleep deserted her. She didn’t like upsetting her mother, but sometimes retorts sprang to her lips and were out of her mouth before she could stop them. In the darkness Eveleen sighed. It was her biggest failing, she knew. But her mother was a difficult and complex woman to understand. Even Mary herself did not seem to know exactly what it was she wanted in life, so how were her children expected to know. At times she would be exhorting them to work harder, to “make something of themselves”; at others she was castigating them for “getting above themselves” and warning them that they should “know their place”.
Now their father . . . Eveleen smiled to herself at the mere thought of him. He was easy to understand. Straightforward, placid, loving, and generous as far as his meagre wage would allow him to be. His generosity of spirit went much further than monetary gifts. More than anything, he gave of himself. He gave time and patience to his children. He always had done so, as far back as Eveleen could remember, even helping her as a small child t
o learn to read, though hardly a scholar himself. He would painstakingly write the letters of the alphabet on to her slate with a piece of white chalk and point to each one, guiding her hand as she traced the outlines of the letters herself.
Even then her mother had grumbled. ‘An education’s wasted on a girl. What she needs to learn is how to cook and wash and sew and look after a family. What good’s fancy learning going to be for her?’
But Walter Hardcastle only smiled indulgently at his wife and said gently, ‘You’re right, of course, my dear. Eveleen must learn all those things and who better to teach her than you.’ Then he would pause and add quietly, but with a firmness that even his wife could not ignore, ‘But it will do her no harm to learn her letters and go to school. One day, it might come in useful.’
Despite a restless night, Eveleen was up first the following morning. The fire in the range had been stoked up and the breakfast laid before even her father appeared. When her mother came down, Eveleen went back upstairs to her bedroom to wash in the china bowl and to put on her pink dress with a high neckline and leg o’ mutton sleeves. Today Jimmy would cope with the early morning milking, so Eveleen made her bed and then laid out the only two bonnets she possessed. Biting her lip, she stood looking down at them. The newest, the one she had only had since the previous Easter, was by far the prettiest, but it was her best one. The older one was becoming shabby, although her mother declared there was plenty of wear left in it yet.
Deciding suddenly, Eveleen snatched up her best bonnet and pushed the other one back into the wardrobe. She would have to get past her mother without Mary seeing it. She crept down the stairs and into the kitchen. Her mother, clearing away the breakfast things, looked up.
‘Look sharp, Eveleen, your father’s waiting for you in the yard.’
Hiding the bonnet beneath the cream shawl she carried, Eveleen hurried forward to kiss her mother’s cheek and then flew out of the house. Picking up her skirts she ran across the yard and climbed into the pony and trap borrowed each market day from the big house.
Only when they were safely out of the gate and a short distance down the lane did Eveleen breathe a sigh of satisfaction and put on her bonnet.
‘Oho,’ Walter Hardcastle chuckled. ‘I wondered why you came out of the house at a gallop. Now I know.’
Eveleen laughed aloud and then tucked her arm through her father’s. ‘But you won’t tell her, Dad, will you?’
‘’Course not, love. Our secret, eh?’
Eveleen hugged his arm to her side, her love for him spilling over as they laughed together.
Then Eveleen lifted her face and breathed in the sharp air. An early morning frost silvered the ground and turned trees and hedges into gossamer threads as delicate as her mother’s pillow lace. A mist hung over the land and shrouded the trees. But the sun, rising palely before them, would soon warm the earth, melt away the frost and disperse the mist. It was going to be a lovely day.
And today she might see Stephen.
Four
The village of Bernby lay on a hill to the west of Grantham. Even further west, down the steep, narrow lane twisting beneath the overhanging trees of Bernby Covert and over the footbridge across the bubbling beck, lay the Dunsmores’ 700-acre farm and the homes of their employees.
George Dunsmore had been born in Pear Tree Farm and at the age of twenty had inherited the house, forty acres of arable land and a herd of cows. But George was ambitious. He chose as his wife a girl from good farming stock and together they determined to build a future, not only for themselves, but also for the next generation.
Ann Dunsmore bore five children but only three lived to adulthood. George Dunsmore focused his hopes and dreams upon his only surviving son, Ernest. With Ernest’s birth in 1855, George added more acreage to his farm and built a grand mansion, Fairfield House, just across the fields behind his former home.
Ben Hardcastle had worked on the land from the age of twelve and at fifteen had been the first farm labourer George Dunsmore employed. They worked shoulder to shoulder, just the two of them, from dawn to dusk and beyond. A year after George’s son’s birth, Ben married Emily and George offered them the tied dwelling, Pear Tree Farm. Soon George employed other men on his expanding farm, but he made Ben his head stockman and Ben Hardcastle was always the man the others looked up to.
George Dunsmore was a lucky man. By the time he died in 1890 at the age of sixty-five, he had lived long enough to see his ambitions realized and he died happy in the certain knowledge that his son would continue his life’s work. By that time, the farm had already grown to five hundred acres and he had seen Ernest marry and present him with a grandson, Stephen, who would one day inherit all that George had striven for.
The Hardcastles had not been quite so fortunate. A year after their marriage Emily gave birth to a son, Walter, but that same night his birth had caused her death. Within a year, however, Ben married a kindly woman who, unable to have children of her own, had lavished affection on her stepson. Neither Ben nor his son Walter had been ambitious and were content to live on in Pear Tree Farm and work for the enterprising Dunsmores. As the years passed and the estate grew, the Hardcastles, while being liked and respected, no longer held the unofficial position of the boss’s right-hand man and confidant. A farm bailiff, Josiah Jackson, now administered the day-to-day running of the estate and while Walter carried on his father’s work as gathman, he no longer held a privileged position.
‘That Josiah Jackson would turn us out of our home, if he could,’ Mary would often say, only to be placated by her gentle, unassuming husband.
‘Oh come now, Mary love, I’m sure that isn’t so.’
Mary would shake her head and smile and say, ‘Oh, Walter, what am I going to do with you? Sometimes, I think you’re just too good to be true. You don’t see wrong in anyone, do you?’ And she would pass the back of his chair and plant a kiss on his thinning hair. Walter would only chuckle and his eyes would twinkle. ‘Well, I’ve my stepmother to thank for that, love,’ he would say.
‘She was a lovely woman,’ Walter, speaking of Elizabeth, his stepmother, would tell Eveleen often. ‘It’s my only real sorrow in life that neither my dad nor my stepmother lived to see you and Jimmy. How she would have loved you,’ he would murmur, reaching out to touch his daughter’s wild halo of hair.
Then Eveleen would hug her father. ‘I wish I’d known her too, Dad, and your father.’
‘He was a nice man, such a kind man.’ Her father’s voice would soften as he remembered. ‘Such a shame he died earlier than he should have done. He was only in his forties. I – I found him you know. Collapsed in the field next to our house. A heart attack, the doctor said. No one could have done anything, even if we’d been with him when it happened.’
Eveleen would always shudder when her father recounted this tragedy. She could feel her father’s sadness and share his helplessness. The poor man, dying alone in the middle of a field and no one even there to hold his hand.
‘What happened to your stepmother?’ Eveleen knew the answer, but also knew instinctively that her question helped her father to talk about it. It did him good to talk about one of the saddest days in his life.
‘She was distraught, devastated by my father’s death. Couldn’t come to terms with it at all. She blamed hersen, although that was nonsense, of course. The doctor – everyone – tried to reassure her but she wouldn’t listen. She just went downhill afterwards. So fast. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with me own eyes that anyone could go from being a happy, laughing, healthy woman to skin and bone in a few weeks. She didn’t live many months after he went.’
Sorrow and guilt were in her father’s voice. ‘It wasn’t your fault. You mustn’t feel responsible, Dad,’ Eveleen would try to reassure him, but her father’s answer was always the same. ‘But I do, love. I do. I can’t help thinking that if only I’d looked after her better . . .’
Now, sitting together in the trap bowling their wa
y to market, Eveleen asked, ‘Dad, how did you and Mam meet? I know you lived alone in our house after your parents died, but you’ve never told me how you met our mam.’
Joining the lane at the end of the track leading from their home, Walter turned to the left and then after a quarter of a mile or so took another left turn. They passed the wrought-iron gates leading into the sweeping drive of Fairfield House. Eveleen risked a glance and found she was holding her breath, but there was no sign of Stephen.
The pony trotted on, splashing through the ford beside the footbridge across the beck and labouring up the hill towards Bernby Covert. The road passed beneath the trees, cold where the sun had not yet penetrated the shadows, and on towards Bernby village and then Grantham. Eveleen loved these trips with her father, loved having him all to herself for a few precious hours. They talked about all sorts of things and she soaked up his knowledge, his wisdom and revelled in his obvious love for his family.
But now he was not answering her immediately. He was sitting, holding the reins lightly in his hands and staring straight ahead.
‘Dad?’ Eveleen prompted.
With her arm still through his, she felt, rather than heard, his heavy sigh. His words came hesitantly, reluctantly. ‘She came to work for the Dunsmores one potato-picking time.’ Walter cleared his throat and seemed to be choosing his words very carefully. ‘The work was very hard for her. Not – not what she had been used to. She was – er – ill and, because I was living on my own, I took her in and looked after her. Mrs Dunsmore – the old lady that is – heard about it and said it wasn’t seemly.’
Father and daughter exchanged a knowing smile. It was the sort of phrase that Mary herself now used constantly.
‘So you married her?’
‘Not straight away.’ Again, Eveleen could detect that Walter was being careful to select his words. ‘Mr Ernest had been married just over a year and his wife had just had Master Stephen and she needed help about the place. In the house and with the dairy work. So when ya mam felt well again, she went to live in for a while at Fairfield House.’
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