by Marie Joseph
The doctor should have been sent for, though Nellie didn’t have much time for doctors, either. One had wanted to examine her once when she had told him about a pain in her side, but she’d given him short shrift. ‘Make me a rubbing bottle up. I’ll get it right myself,’ she’d told him, and though the house reeked of wintergreen for three weeks the pain disappeared, never to return.
She stood still on the bend in the wide stairs. When the master had untied the young lass’s skirt, hadn’t there been a soft swell of her belly? And what about the blue veins on the full breasts? Nellie gripped the bowl so hard the water sloshed up the side.
‘Nay … never …’ she said aloud.
The girl before Biddy had kept her shame a secret for months till the day Nellie had gone into her room without knocking and caught her stark naked, staring at her reflection in the wardrobe mirror.
Nellie’s small head moved from side to side as the certainty grew on her. There was no wedding ring, but then there wouldn’t be, would there? Nellie forced herself to continue her way upstairs. The workhouse was the right and the only place for fallen girls, and that was where this one would go as soon as she was fit to stand. She, Nellie Martindale, would see to that personally.
Annie lay perfectly flat in the high bed watching the firelight flickering on the flowered wallpaper. She was dreaming. No, she was awake. She closed her eyes and remembered walking, head bent, along a narrow lane. There was a gale tearing the breath from her body, sending hard shafts of frozen rain at her, blinding her, so that when the horse came straight at her she was conscious only of a huge black shape towering over her, blotting out the sky.
She sat up, held out her arms and saw she was wearing a nightdress so shrunk in the wash that the sleeves ended six inches from her wrists. There was a pain down her side and a nauseating throbbing in her head.
‘So you’ve come to, then?’
The girl sitting in a shadowed corner of the room came towards the bed smiling. The first thing Annie noticed about her was the roundness of her face. Pert and pretty, she had an upturned nose and a cloud of fly-away brown hair, topped by a shrivel of a lace cap.
‘You mustn’t get bothered,’ she was saying. ‘Mr Armstrong says there’s nothing broken, though you’re going to be black and blue tomorrow. It was his horse what kicked you.’
Annie closed her eyes as the ceiling dipped and swayed towards her, but then the feeling of sinking down through the bed was worse. There was a scorching pain in her side and a dragging ache in the small of her back. When she opened her eyes again the brown-haired girl was leaning over her, speaking in a hoarse whisper.
‘Were you running away?’
Annie bit her lip. ‘Running away from the workhouse, really. I was looking for a place to work.’
‘This isn’t a big house,’ Biddy said, as quickly as if she’d read Annie’s mind. ‘There’s only me and the housekeeper.’ The round eyes narrowed. ‘She nearly fainted dead away when Mr Armstrong whipped all your clothes off.’
Annie tried to sit up. ‘My clothes? My bundle?’ She swung her legs over the side of the bed, stood up – and gave a soft little cry as the floor came up and hit her smack between the eyes.
There was a man standing by the side of her bed when she surfaced once again – a powerfully-built giant of a man, with an abundance of silver-fair hair and a wind-brown face. His eyes were filled with genuine concern.
‘How are you feeling now?’
Annie turned her head towards the window. Surely the last time she’d looked out the curtains had been drawn against the night, and a girl with brown curly hair had talked to her. Now it was light, and huge flakes of snow fell silently, straight down, like a beaded curtain.
‘I’d best get up.’ She raised herself on an elbow, only to feel a firm hand on her shoulder.
‘You’ll stay where you are.’ The big man walked to the door. ‘That snow’s not pretending.’
‘But I’ve got to get on my way!’ Annie could hear herself becoming agitated. The dizziness had almost gone, the throbbing in her head was less acute, but the soreness down her side and the ache in her back were worse. ‘I’ve got to find a place before the snow starts to stick.’
Seth turned, a hand on the brass door handle. Already the snow was a spread blanket, merging the fields and the paths into one. His calls would have to be made on foot and he would have to go now to get back before dark. The girl seemed comfortable enough and the swelling on her forehead was going down a little. He’d ask Biddy to make sure to keep the fire going, and he’d ask Mrs Martindale to make one of her milk jellies. He felt impatient to be away, and yet responsible for the girl being here at all.
‘The least I can do is keep you here till you’re fit to leave.’ He opened the door wide. ‘Is there any family fretting about where you’ve got to? Anybody expecting you?’
‘Nobody fretting and nobody expecting,’ Annie told him.
‘I see …’ He nodded, his mind seemingly on other more important things. ‘I see.’
Then he was gone, his heavy boots clattering down the stairs. Annie heard him calling out as he left the house, giving orders in a deep voice, slamming a door behind him.
Biddy wondered what Mrs Martindale would do if she found out that the girl upstairs was expecting. She doubted if the old bat would be making her a milk jelly, measuring out the gelatine, the tip of her tongue poking out between her thin lips. But Biddy had realised a long time ago that what Mr Armstrong said was gospel where his housekeeper was concerned. If he’d asked her to sit on the fire she’d have done so. When he spoke Biddy noticed she gave a little bob, not quite a curtsey, but as near as damn it. Mrs Martindale had been trained donkey’s years ago in a big house teeming with servants, a little cog in a big wheel, Biddy suspected. Now she was a big cog in a little wheel, with just one underling to boss about.
‘Annie Clancy,’ she was saying now. ‘That’s what she says her name is.’ The milk was poured grudgingly into the gelatine. ‘Wouldn’t you say Clancy was Irish, Biddy?’
‘Not Welsh, Mrs Martindale.’
‘And if Irish, it’s ten to one the girl’s an R.C.’
‘Beholden to the Pope,’ said Biddy, in the mood for stirring things up.
‘Having children for His Holiness. Dozens and dozens of them so that one day they take us all over.’
‘An English Pope on our throne.’
‘She’ll have to go,’ said Mrs Martindale, stirring so vigorously that the milk slopped up and spattered the scrubbed table.
By nightfall there was no sign of Seth. A blizzard had blown up, shifting the thick powdered snow into dunes, rippling it away as far as the eye could see. Biddy’s sweetheart had failed to appear at their arranged time and Biddy, growing tired of him and of all the panting and struggling for the virtue she had no intention of relinquishing, told herself she didn’t give a tuppenny damn.
Mrs Martindale had done what she’d been told to do for Annie, and not a thing more. So it was left to Biddy to carry the slops, make the fire up in the spare room’s tiny grate, help Annie along the landing to it, and wrap a hot brick in a blanket for the bed, shoving it in at the bottom and telling Annie to get her feet on it and be blowed to chilblains.
‘I’ve never been as warm in my life,’ Annie whispered. The pain in her back was spreading round to her front. It was like the grinding ache she was used to experiencing every month. Annie drew her knees up to ease it.
‘I think you’ve got yourself into trouble, Annie,’ Biddy said all of a sudden.
‘I’ve not!’ Annie’s reaction was swift. ‘Why do you say a thing like that?’
‘Because I know the signs.’ Biddy sat down on the side of the bed. ‘Two of my sisters got themselves into trouble, with men who promptly disappeared – that’s why Mam sent me here to keep me safe. She thinks that only pigs and cows do that kind of thing in the country.’
Annie didn’t know what to say. In her mind, a memory of Laurie Yates bendi
ng his dark curly head to kiss her bare shoulders, the way his body had swayed against hers, the way she had allowed him to lead her through into the back room …
‘He’s coming back to marry me!’ she cried. ‘In September. On my birthday. He’s away at sea. We’re as good as married now; every bit as good.’ She drew in a breath as a pain tightened in her back, spreading itself round to her stomach in a warm wave of agony. ‘I’ve just got to keep going until September. Find a place. Work.’ She held out her hands. ‘I can do the work of three men, Biddy! I’m as strong as any lad. Stronger!’
‘Biddy? What are you doing up there?’ Mrs Martindale’s tinny voice spiralled up the stairs. ‘Fetch two candlesticks down. Quick! Mr Armstrong’s come back. He looks fit to drop.’
‘So it’s all hands to the pumps,’ Biddy said cheerfully, picking up a candlestick from the top of a mahogany tallboy. She turned at the door. ‘She’d lick the snow off his boots if he asked her to.’
Mrs Martindale couldn’t do enough for Seth. She took away his heavy coat sodden with snow, and sent Biddy to fetch his slippers. She gave him a towel to rub his hair, though Biddy could see her fingers were itching to do it herself.
She loves him, Biddy realised all at once. Not in the way a woman loves a man. Not with her being old enough to be his mother, but like a mother. Fussing, cosseting, and getting nowhere fast, because if ever there was a man who could fend for himself it was the animal doctor.
Biddy knew that he’d been married to a wife who went completely mad when their first baby had been born perfect in every way, but dead. She had tried to get the details from Mrs Martindale, but all she could find out was that the poor demented girl had refused to eat, ending up with no more flesh on her than a plucked sparrow.
‘It was a blessing when she passed on. She had shoulder blades on her like coat-hangers,’ the housekeeper had said. ‘You could have dropped her through a grid and it wouldn’t even have taken the skin off her big toe.’
‘There’s some nice hot broth ready for you, sir.’ Mrs Martindale bent over the black pan on the fire. ‘You go through to your den where it’s warm.’
Seth snapped his fingers and a black and white dog woke at once from a twitching sleep and moved to his side. ‘How’s the girl?’
Mrs Martindale was already spooning the broth into a dish. ‘Coming on nicely, sir. She’ll be able to leave in a few days.’
Seth glanced up the stairway as he walked across the wide flagged passage-way. ‘If the snow clears …’ All the signs of a long hard frost were there. Already a fox had come down from the high slopes and massacred five hens. Not a domestically-inclined man, Seth nevertheless reminded himself that the spirit lamp in the outside privy must be kept alight to stave off the frost. He turned back to the kitchen.
‘You can leave it all to me, sir,’ Mrs Martindale assured him. ‘Go to the outside and see to that lamp,’ she told Biddy the minute he had closed the door behind him.
‘The old flarcher,’ Biddy muttered, putting a shawl round her head and stepping out into a freezing snow-filled wind that tore her breath away. At three o’clock the next morning as the house slept Biddy woke up with a shuddering jerk.
The temperature in her room was below freezing, and when she padded over to the window to draw back the curtain, the pane was opaque with whorls of ice. She had definitely heard something, but what? Some noise had prodded her awake when normally she was so tired she slept the sleep of the dead. She listened, her head on one side. She padded to the door, opened it and listened again …
And heard the girl in the spare room moaning and whimpering like an animal caught in a trap.
Not many hours before she had watched her employer dose Annie Clancy with a sedative. With her own eyes she had seen him measure it out carefully, promising Annie that she would sleep like a baby and wake feeling much, much better.
Holding her candlestick high, Biddy moved along the landing.
Annie’s face was wrenched out of shape with pain. Her knees were drawn up, her long red hair almost black with sweat.
Biddy pulled back the piled blankets and saw the blood-stained sheet. She set the candle down on the high bedside table. ‘Your baby’s coming away. You’re losing it.’
‘Thank God for that! Oh, thank God for that!’
The words said themselves. Annie’s eyes were wide, her voice too high.
‘I tried to get shut of it by mangling the washing folded thick. I prayed on me knees. I jumped down the stairs – but nothing would budge it.’ She lay back as a pain gripped her. She turned her head into the pillow, tears rolling down her flushed cheeks. ‘The Lord be praised.’
‘You wicked, wicked girl!’
Mrs Martindale stood framed in the doorway, two grey plaits as thin as ropes hanging over her shoulders. ‘Do you know what you’re saying?’ She walked flat-footed over to the bed, wincing as she saw the sheets.
‘I’ll get them clean.’ Annie was wiping the tears away with the back of her hand. ‘A good soak in salt water then a boil with a drop of ammonia in the water will bring them up as good as new.’ She clutched her back, talking too quickly, hardly knowing what she was saying, just wanting to be left alone to bear the pain, and get whatever had to happen over with quick.
‘I think we ought to wake Mr Armstrong up.’ Biddy covered Annie up again, smoothed the damp hair back from the hot forehead. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying or doing. It’s my guess she’s been going quietly off her chump these past few months.’
‘It’s you what’s going off your chump, Biddy Baker.’ The housekeeper turned round to see Seth standing quietly in the doorway. He was fully dressed.
‘You’ve been falling asleep in your chair again, sir.’ She chided him as if he was a naughty boy. ‘Get you off to bed, sir. It’s no place for a man in here. Me and Biddy can see to things.’
In her agitation she moved round the bed as if to block any glimpse of what might be happening from him, but he was too quick for her. Before she could stretch out a hand to prevent it he pulled back the bedclothes, held his candlestick high.
‘It’s all right, Annie. You know that you’re losing the baby you were expecting, don’t you?’ His voice was gentle.
‘She doesn’t care!’ Mrs Martindale chewed the end of one of her plaits in her agitation. ‘She’s been trying to get rid of it, she said so.’
Annie’s eyes flew wide with fright as a pain gripped and burned and twisted low down in the small of her back.
‘You can’t stop in here, sir.’ The thought of it was making Mrs Martindale go hot and cold. ‘It’s one thing with animals, but yon’s a young woman, not a cow or a horse. It’s not seemly for you to …’
‘Off to your bed, woman!’
There was no gentleness in Seth’s voice now, no compassion in the rain-grey eyes. Biddy was thrilled with the drama of it all, sure in her mind that if the old bat hadn’t scuttled from the room Mr Armstrong would have lifted her bodily and chucked her out onto the landing.
6
THEY WERE WELL into February, with no sign of a thaw, though some mornings the temperature rose briefly above freezing, causing trees and the overhanging eaves of the old house to drip continuously. The wind was still in the east, screaming at times in fury across the vast wastes of pure white snow banked high in places like miniature mountain peaks. It was beautiful and it was terrible, and Annie thrived on it.
In some ways she was a child again, able to push the night when she had lost the baby right to the back of her mind. Mr Armstrong had done things for her that flooded her with shame, though Biddy had explained that delivering calves and horses was all in a day’s work to the animal doctor, so the sight of a bit of blood and a half-finished baby wouldn’t exactly put him off his breakfast.
She told Annie that sometimes when she was stuck for what to read she borrowed a book from the big glass-fronted bookcase in his den to look at the riveting pictures of animals’ insides. In great detail, she explained
what had to be done when a calf was coming out backwards. ‘First an arm and a hand has to be soaped, then …’
Annie’s eyes grew rounder as she listened. Fancy her never knowing that a cow had four stomachs, or that if they made too much gas the cow swelled up just like a balloon. Not sparing the details, Biddy told Annie what happened when a sharp instrument was jabbed in, so that compared to all what he had done for Annie it wouldn’t amount to more than pulling a tooth.
‘Mrs Martindale thought it was awful, him seeing to you, but then Mrs Martindale thinks having your bowels moved is rude,’ Biddy went on to explain, narrowing her eyes into concentrated slits as she tried to remember the illustration showing the procedure for gelding a horse.
‘For what?’ Annie wanted to know.
Biddy told her – in great detail.
On a day when a blizzard kept the sky dark all day, Mrs Martindale went outside to the privy and slipped on a patch of black ice, badly spraining her right wrist and twisting an ankle.
Seth examined the wrist carefully, bent her fingers back one by one, assured her there were no bones broken, made her a sling out of a three-cornered kerchief and told her to rest up for a while. ‘Annie’s here to help Biddy,’ he said, an amused glint in his eyes at the furious expression on his housekeeper’s face. ‘You don’t give her enough to do, though it strikes me she’s very capable. I suppose she told you she was bringing five younger brothers up after her mother died?’
‘Before she got herself into trouble,’ Mrs Martindale felt obligated to remind him.
In the days that followed Annie was wound up with what she recognised must be happiness. The house, with its carpets and gleaming furniture, was like the houses she had read about in the magazines she used to borrow from Edith Morris. The coal sat by the fires in scuttles, not buckets, and there were long curtains at the windows instead of torn and yellowed paper blinds. Mr Armstrong ate his meals with a white damask napkin spread on his knee, and there was even a small screen to stop the fire from being too hot on his face when he sat in his winged armchair reading, often well into the night.