by Marie Joseph
Dear Mr Armstrong,
This is to tell you that I am sorry to be leaving this house, and I would not be going if there was any way I could stay.
She swallowed the lump in her throat, and widened her eyes as if challenging the tears to fall.
Thank you for everything. I have been very happy under your roof. Mrs Martindale knows the place I am going to. It is a relative of hers who is always needing help.
Yours truly, Annie Clancy
A pathetic letter, saying nothing and meaning less. Annie hesitated for a moment before folding it up into a neat square. Did she owe him a letter at all?
Her hand smoothed the mattress. This was the room where her baby had come away from her in a long night of pain. With him caring for her, holding her hands, wiping the sweat from her face. Each time she had opened her eyes he had been there, watchful by the fire, his grey eyes steady when he looked at her. Promising her that all would be well.
Annie heard the rumble of wheels on the drive outside, got up from the bed and gathered her things together.
Oh, yes. For that alone she owed the animal doctor a letter.
‘Well, Annie?’
The carter was waiting, impatient to be gone. Annie could see him outside hunched over his knees on the high seat of the cart. What did the housekeeper expect her to say? By going she was making it possible for Biddy to keep her job, and after last night to stay was out of the question. So what was there left to say?
‘Well, Mrs Martindale?’ Annie opened her mouth to say more, then closed it again.
There were no tears, no last look round the by now familiar kitchen. ‘Say goodbye to Biddy for me.’ Annie was leaving in dignity – she was determined of that.
But as the carrier’s horse clip-clopped its way down the drive, Annie twisted round in her seat for a last glimpse of the old stone house. Hoping, in spite of her resolution, to see Biddy shaking a duster out of one of the bedroom windows.
But Biddy was lying on her bed at the back of the house, eagerly devouring an article in a magazine telling her how to enlarge her bust by six inches in less than thirty days, without resorting to pills, massage, or wooden cups. She gloated over four pictures of a woman in the throes of transformation. In the first one as flat as if she’d been spoke-shaved; two slight bud-like swellings in the second; on the third the swellings had taken on balloon-like proportions, but the last defied description. Biddy felt sure the model would never be able to stand up close to anyone again!
Annie was trying hard not to cry, and seeing this the carter left her alone. It was obvious the girl was trying to sort something out in her mind; he could see her lips moving.
What Annie was trying hard to sort out was how quickly and unexpectedly kindness could turn into something else. She shuddered. Laurie had been kind. At first he had held her gently … The animal doctor had shown her such a wealth of kindness, talking to her, telling her his secrets, so that she had felt safe with him too. She had trusted him – just as she had trusted Laurie.
Annie shook her head. Mr Armstrong must have thought her so naive, sitting with him in his room, taking off her cap the minute he asked her to, shaking her hair free. Thinking that the expression in his eyes was nothing more than pleasure at the sight of her hair. He had told her more than once it was the colour of russet leaves.
Mrs Martindale had tried to warn her. ‘Never be in the same room as the master on your own,’ she’d said. Warning, when all the time Annie had thought she was just being her bitter pernickety self.
And yet, last night when he had told her about his father, she had seen the pain in his eyes, she had responded by going to him and twining his fingers in her own – with kindness. Annie frowned. Because he had accepted that a girl who was going to have a baby by a man she confessed she hardly knew could hardly be an innocent, he had … he had …
A groan escaped her as she remembered the way he had pulled her up towards him, holding her so close she could feel the hardness of him, kissing her so that her lips still felt bruised …
‘All right, lass?’
The carrier, a man of forty-nine, with two daughters of his own, raised his eyebrows as this young lass shot him a look of such apprehension he almost fell off his seat. And all for trying to be kind, he muttered, relapsing into silence once again.
When Seth rode back that evening, a bedraggled puppy with a broken foreleg curled up in his saddlebag, he was exhausted and as hungry as the proverbial hunter. Striding into the house, he made straight for the kitchen.
‘Where’s Annie?’ He put the puppy down by the fire. ‘Give him some warm gravy when you’ve finished what you’re doing, Biddy. They weren’t prepared to nurse him where I found him, and I’d be damned if I was going to put the little fella down.’
His own dog lumbered in from the hall, circled the puppy for a while then began to lick it.
‘Where’s Annie?’ Seth said again.
The network of wrinkles on his housekeeper’s forehead deepened before she answered him. ‘She’s gone, sir. She went with the carrier this morning. I packed her some food and she went.’
‘Went where?’ Seth towered over her. ‘She had nowhere to go, for God’s sake! What the devil are you talking about, woman?’
‘I tried to stop her, sir, but she’d made her mind up.’
‘Biddy?’ Seth’s face was working in disbelief.
‘She told me you knew, sir.’ Biddy refused to look at the woman standing by the table, twisting her hands together. ‘She said she had a place to go to, and that if she didn’t take the carrier’s cart today she could be here indefinitely.’
‘I knew nothing!’
Seth was aware of his housekeeper and his servant girl staring at him as if he’d gone mad. He made for the door. Whenever Annie Clancy went or wherever she went wasn’t his province. He had brought her here limp and unconscious, thinking she was a tramp woman, and he had tended her, just as he would have tended a distressed animal, when she had lost her baby that night. Her bright presence had gladdened his heart. She had been happy here, he could have sworn it. When she was better and the colour had come back to her cheeks, her trusting eyes had given away her happiness.
But last night he had betrayed that trust. In one unthinking moment he had put the fear of God in her. She had bolted her door against him, believing that he would break it down. The freezing wind had stung his cheeks to scarlet, but now the colour drained away, leaving him grey and ill-looking.
Nellie stood up and gripped the back of her chair hard to still the trembling of her hands. The lie came easily to her lips.
‘I tried to stop her, sir, but she’d made up her mind.’ The small head went to one side. ‘She seemed upset about something.’
For a moment she thought her employer would strike her. He was staring at her with such a blazing anger in his eyes, his whole face distorted. He was remembering how last night, as he had stood in the hall watching young Annie rushing up the stairs, he had caught a glimpse of a door opening slightly, the door of his housekeeper’s room. And now she was putting two and two together and coming up with God alone knew what.
‘You let her go?’ he thundered. ‘You allowed a young girl like Annie to go with the carrier in this weather: She could die out there! Do you realise that? Didn’t you even try to stop her? Didn’t you even ask her where she was going?’
‘It wasn’t me what upset her, sir.’
The words were said quietly, but they struck home. Seth crumpled as if he’d been punched from behind. ‘How long has she been gone?’
‘All day. She’ll be miles away by now. Back home by this time, I feel sure of that.’
‘Did you know the carter?’
‘It was one I’ve never seen before.’
Clicking his finger and thumb for the dog to follow him, Seth crossed the stone passageway and went into his den, calling out first for his meal, telling them to look sharp about it. Slamming the door so hard that the very foundations of the
old house seemed to tremble.
Nellie Martindale knew then that throwing Annie Clancy’s letter on the fire had been justified. The master was badly shaken; she knew him too well for him to be able to hide a thing like that. She wouldn’t put it past him riding out to fetch Annie back if he knew where she’d gone. But he didn’t know, did he? She stared into the fire as if she could still see the flames licking the note, shrivelling it away.
7
EDITH MORRIS WAS a single-minded woman. If she had been able to persuade herself years ago that her duty lay with the black heathens in Africa rather than with her mother she would, she often told herself, be running a Mission School by now, teaching rows of woolly-haired children about reading, writing, arithmetic and Jesus.
She was too old at fifty to realise her ambition. She accepted that, but since her mother’s death her life had taken on an emptiness that terrified her. She was working full-time at the mill, going out in the dark and coming home in the dark, but it was closing the front door behind her, knowing that she wouldn’t even hear the sound of her own voice till the next day, that defeated her.
The bed by the window had been taken back upstairs. It left a gap that Edith filled with a tall pedestal table bearing an aspidistra plant. She would sit by the fire after the evening chores were done remembering the days when she had gone to work sharing her mother’s shawl, because there wasn’t the money for a coat for the painfully thin twelve year old girl. Her father she couldn’t remember at all, but her mother had told her how he was killed on a factory outing, trampled by the horse drawing the waggonette. ‘The man who got him from under the wheels was drunk for a month afterwards,’ she would say.
Edith wondered what it would have been like if she’d married: If her mother hadn’t taken to her bed all those years ago, tying her daughter to her as surely as if she’d had her at the end of a rope. She wondered if the rest of her life was going to be as empty as this. Coming home to this hurting silence, staring at the aspidistra plant, almost willing it to talk to her.
She couldn’t envisage a future so barren. She started a purl row, felt a sharp pain stab at her heart, and knew there was something she could do about her loneliness if she was persistent enough.
The inside of the Clancys’ house appalled her. The table didn’t look as if it was cleared between one meal and another. The ashpan was so filled with dead ashes it was pushed out into the hearth, and she was sure a bird could have nested in Florrie Clancy’s hair without anybody being any the wiser.
‘I’ve called to see if you can give me Annie’s address,’ she said straight out, looking at Jack Clancy who was sitting on a low stool by the fire with a last gripped between his knees, nailing a clog-iron back on to its wooden sole.
He shot Edith a look, a look of disgust and contempt, then went back to his hammering, banging away, ignoring her.
‘I’d like to write to her,’ Edith said, standing her ground, determined not to be intimidated by a mere man. ‘I’d like to know how she is, and I’d like to go and see her.’ She finished on a rush. ‘An’ if she’s not happy, bring her back.’
The staccato hammering stopped immediately. Jack lurched to his feet, clattering last, clog and hammer to the floor. To her horror Edith found him standing next to her, his face pushed into hers, his eyes on a leave with her own. He smelt of drink and sweat. His closeness was an affront to her fastidiousness. She could feel the heat and the violence emanating from him. She was sure he was going to strike her.
‘We don’t talk about Annie in this house. Not now, and not ever! There’s no address and there will never be no address, an’ if we ever got one it would go straight to the back of the fire!’
The spirit in Edith that would have taken her into the African jungle to confront far worse than this filthy slavering man squaring up to her, glaring at her with his bloodshot eyes, rose up in her.
‘Mark my words,’ she said, in a whisper that seemed to echo round the room. ‘I will find Annie. I will find her wherever she is, and if she’s not happy I’ll fetch her back to live with me.’ She spun round on her heel to fire a parting salvo. ‘She’s not had much luck with the men in her life, that innocent child.’ She flung the door open to step out into the night. ‘My mother used to say it was a man’s world, and by all that’s holy she was right! The only good man that’s ever lived was put to death. On a cross!’
‘She’s barmy, chuck. Not right in the head.’
Florrie’s hand on her husband’s arm was firm. She could feel his anger subsiding even as she led him to his chair. In the months she had been married to Jack Clancy she had come to know him very well. All shout and bluster, a man who asked for little else but his beer and his food, and a bit of the other two or three times a week. A father who never laid a finger on his sons, leaving their upbringing entirely to her. Not a man for inconvenient hobbies like most of his mates with their pigeons and their ferrets. Not the sort of man who went off at weekends walking the fells, fishing the streams, or climbing the hills, coming home whacked and good for nothing.
‘She should be locked away,’ she soothed. ‘Put away for the rest of her natural.’
‘She doesn’t know.’ Jack’s head was down, his hands hanging loosely between his knees. ‘How can she know … the potty old maid.’
‘The ugly sod,’ said Florrie, to make him feel better. ‘If she’d ever had a man she wouldn’t talk such rubbish. She’ll not find Annie. Your Annie will have let on her feet, you mark my words.’
Annie had never been so cold in her life. Huddled deep into the long black cloak she saw birds wheeling over sodden fields; she saw flowing ditches and the flooded gardens of stone-built cottages. When they came to a river the driver pointed out the height of the fast-flowing water.
‘Another foot and yon bridge wouldn’t take it. Yon’s more like a highland stream this year.’ He spat a trickle of brown saliva from the side of his mouth. ‘Some folks say they’ve seen the signs of an early spring but there’s nowt I’ve seen yet to back them up. I wouldn’t be surprised if it snows again. It’s cold enough for it.’
Annie was too miserable to care one way or the other. When she had told the driver where she was going, a strange expression had crossed his weather-beaten face.
‘Tha knows Barney Eccles then?’
‘No. Do you?’ Annie had asked him.
‘I knows of him,’ the carter had told her. ‘Aye, I knows of him all reet. Tha’re sure tha wants tekking there?’
Annie merely nodded. She was too unhappy to think straight. It had all happened too quickly. It was hard to believe she wouldn’t be going to bed that night in the room with the shining furniture. Hard to accept that she’d been wrong about the animal doctor all along. But all that was behind her now. She had left her room as clean and tidy as time had allowed. She’d rolled her mattress up and tied it into a sausage with string – as if she had died of the typhoid and the mattress was ready for burning.
She shuddered, and when the driver said he would have to set her down as his horse couldn’t climb the high road to the Eccles’s farm, she thanked him for his company.
‘Tha’s not said two words, lass,’ he muttered. He jerked his head at the hill still patched with snow. ‘Tha’re sure …?’
Annie nodded, stumbling away from the narrow road, on up the rocky uneven path, clutching her small bundle, keeping her head down against the freezing wind. When the man appeared suddenly from the fringe of gaunt bare trees she was too terrified even to cry out.
Barney Eccles almost dragged Annie the rest of the way up the hill. Then at the house he gave her a push that almost sent her sprawling.
‘Lily? Where the ’eck are you, woman? You’ll never believe it when I tell you what I’ve found!’ A hand as large and red as a knuckle-end of ham gripped Annie’s shoulder. ‘She says Mrs Martindale sent her. Your cousin Nellie. That sourpuss who came to our wedding and give us a pair of bloody sugar tongs for a present.’ He snorted like an outraged bul
l. ‘Nay, surely if I can remember her, you can! Once seen never forgotten, I’d say, with a phizog like that!’
‘Oh, her.’
Lily Eccles, a bare-bottomed child clinging to her skirts, a baby balanced on her hip, slapped yet another child away. Leaning perilously close to the open fire, she stirred something in a large black pan.
‘What’s she want?’ She turned to stare at Annie. ‘Our Nellie’s husband did himself a favour when he got shot through the head.’ She kicked a scrawny cat out of the way. ‘Never did owt for nothing our Nellie didn’t.’
Annie, still staggering from the blast of heat, wrinkling her nose from the stench, stared round the large living-kitchen in dismay.
Seven children, the eldest no more than ten years old, sat, crawled or lolled white-faced against the walls. Seven heads of thick white-blond hair turned uninterested stares in her direction. Every single surface of the big room was covered with piles of clothes, unwashed pans, odd boots, clogs, stacks of old newspapers, the handlebars of a bicycle and an assortment of unwashed crockery, whilst underneath the table a cat lay in a dirty cardboard box, nuzzled by four tiny kittens, each one anchored firmly to an overflowing nipple.
‘She wants to know if there’s a chance you might be needing some help?’ Barney’s ruddy complexion deepened to purple. He slapped a leg with the flat of his hand. ‘She says your Nellie thought we might take her on.’ His laugh was so loud that three of the children began to cry.
‘How much does she want?’
For the first time the woman straightened up from the fire, put the bare-bottomed baby down on the filthy flagged floor, and looked directly at Annie.
‘The last girl wanted two shillings a week and all found, but we can’t afford nothing like that. We’re not moneyed people.’
Annie tried to hide the note of desperation in her voice. It was already going dark outside, and it would take her at least an hour to slide and slither her way back down the hill-slope. Lily Eccles was a woman near to breakdown; you didn’t have to be a doctor to see that. She was so dirty, so slovenly, that compared to her, Annie decided, the woman her father had married looked like she’d just been pressed with a flat iron. The hardness of Lily’s thin body was reflected in her expression. She was daring Annie to say she would stay, but so deep into hopelessness that to ask her would be impossible.