by Marie Joseph
She began to cry, and once started couldn’t stop. She cried not only with pain but because she was tired of fighting, tired of being rejected, weary of having to make her own way in the world, terrified that she would still be going on fighting when she was an old, old woman.
‘Oh, God,’ she sobbed, ‘help me now. Help me, please.’
All the time she cried she could hear a little voice deep inside her telling her that once the relief of letting go was over she would get up and walk on, in one direction or another. Lying in a field feeling sorry for herself wasn’t going to help. Nor was it dignified. She would manage, she would soldier on – she always had and she always would.
But oh, dear God, it was a relief to let go, to stop being brave and proud and quietly dignified. She could scream as loud as she wanted to, or tear at her hair, knowing no one could hear, knowing no one could see.
Ten minutes later she was walking back towards the town, making for the top road again. When she came to where her hat lay she picked it up and plonked it on her head. Defiantly.
There was nothing Seth could do when Jake Tomlinson, a farmer he knew well, stood in his path waving both arms in the air. The awful dread was still in him, but Jake’s best cow was in the middle of calving and Seth soon saw that something was badly wrong. She bellowed her anguish, straining so hard she was in imminent danger of toppling over.
The front legs and nose of her calf were sticking out, but as fast as Seth tried to get a length of baler twine round them they slipped back, making the cow sway dangerously and her heart to palpitate visibly. Seth passed a piece of wood through the loops of twine to make hauling easier, but again and again the calf’s legs and the tip of its nose appeared briefly only to be sucked back immediately. Seth took off his jacket, shouted for a bucket of water and rolled up his shirt sleeves.
‘She’s tekkin her time, Mr Armstrong.’ Old Jake looked almost as distressed as his animal. ‘She wasn’t like this the last time. D’you reckon it’s a big’un?’
There was milk spurting from the cow’s udders and her eyes were rolling. Seth decided to ease her agony with his hands.
‘You’re right about it being a big one,’ he panted, trying to slide his hands into the best position. ‘Move that clean straw over here. I think … I think …’
With a gigantic push that almost toppled the cow over, the calf slithered out on to the straw, blinked and tried to sit up.
Jake was a bit put out when Mr Armstrong wouldn’t go into the farmhouse for a sup of tay. His cow was lowing with pleasure, busily licking the wet slime from her calf. Jake shuddered to think what might have happened if the animal doctor hadn’t chanced along the road. It was a miracle, that’s what it was, an’ you didn’t come across them all that often. Seth Armstrong had the gift of healing in his hands; Jake’s missus thought the world of him. Yet here he was rubbing himself dry on a bit of sacking and putting his jacket and shirt back on, positive he hadn’t time to stop, not even for a brew.
‘It’s my belief there was summat sorely bothering him,’ Jake told his wife.
‘Nowt a sup o’ tay wouldn’t have put right,’ she said, aggrieved.
Seth was so glad to see Annie trudging along the top road he leaned from the trap and shouted at her, all control gone.
‘For God’s sake, where d’you think you’re going? Give me that bag and let’s have you up here.’ In one bound he was out of the trap and by her side, wincing at the sight of her bruised cheek. Almost without volition he stretched out a hand to touch it, then drew back as she jerked her head away. ‘Your father?’ Surely he had the right to ask that?
Annie nodded. ‘But it’s for the last time. He tried to take Adam’s money from me, but I said he was welcome to it. As a sort of payment. I felt I needed to make it clear. Can you understand?’
Seth did understand. He knew exactly what she meant. He admired her more than he’d admired any woman in his life before, but he knew he must subdue the longing in him to put his arms around her and hold her close. There was mud down the front of her dress, her hair was coming down, and he wanted to hold her tenderly as he would an injured bird, calming her, soothing her until her heartbeats slowed and her eyes lost their aching sadness.
‘So where are you going now?’
She nodded towards the town with its slag heaps and tall mill chimneys. ‘I’m going to find a place to stay till I can get a living-in situation. I’ve got enough money to see me right for a while.’ She tilted her chin. ‘I won’t starve.’
‘I can offer you a living-in situation.’ He was very business-like, trying desperately not to show his eagerness. ‘Biddy is finding the house too much for her to manage on her own, and besides, people are beginning to talk.’
Her glance was sharp. ‘Is there reason for them to talk?’
Solemnly he shook his head. ‘There has been no physical contact between us at all.’
He was laughing at her again. Annie searched his face, but he was gazing ahead, apparently perfectly serious, the brim of the slouch hat hiding his expression.
‘You don’t care what people say,’ she accused. ‘You never did.’
‘I admit I am broad in the mind,’ he said, still in that pompous voice, making her lips curve up in the merest semblance of a smile which, if he noticed, he was careful not to comment on.
Annie put a hand over her mouth in the familiar gesture of self-comfort. She was forcing the tears back, experiencing again the moment when she had turned to see the black horse galloping towards her, the trap being driven as if it was part of a chariot race. For a brief second it had seemed to be surrounded by a shimmering white light.
‘You may wear a uniform if you wish,’ he was saying, ‘but the cost will of course be deducted from your wages.’
Her bag was already in the trap, she had only to say the word and she could be turning her back on the town. She could be feeling safe and protected. She could. This man watching her so carefully knew the score now and accepted it. It would be master and maid, just as he had promised.
‘You have to start trusting sometime,’ he said softly, almost as if to himself.
Annie made up her mind. ‘I accept the position, thank you,’ she said, then wondered if the surge of emotion inside her stemmed from laughter or tears.
A bit of both, she suspected.
Biddy had known all along that this would happen. She would look through the window one day and see Mr Armstrong bringing Annie Clancy back. Even though it wasn’t the romantic scene she’d imagined with Annie leaning against him, her face upturned for his kiss. Instead, they just walked in together as if there was nothing extraordinary in it at all.
Biddy thought that Annie looked as if she’d gone three rounds with a fairground boxer. She was covered in mud and her face was the colour of unrisen dough.
‘Rustle up some supper quickly, and bring mine through when I’ve stabled the horse. Annie’s joining us again,’ Mr Armstrong said over a disappearing shoulder.
‘Oh, I’m glad! Really glad!’ Biddy clasped her hands together. ‘He’s not best pleased,’ she told Annie. ‘He’s been in a rare old state since the day you left.’ She unhooked a ladle from the fireplace alcove. ‘Like a man possessed he’s been. Pacing the carpet in his den, backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards, like a caged lion.’
Annie had forgotten that Biddy talked just like an ’a penny book. She sat down suddenly as if her legs had given way and stared round at the familiar kitchen. Biddy brought a crusty cob of bread to the table and began to slice it into thick chunks.
‘In the morning you can tell me all you’ve been doing, but for now just get some of that broth down you. Do you feel as ill as you look?’
‘Worse,’ Annie said, but she was smiling properly for the first time that day. The warmth of her welcome, the kindness in Biddy’s eyes, the fact that she was prepared to wait till the next day to hear Annie’s story, was almost too much to bear.
When Biddy came back fr
om taking Seth’s supper through to the den, Annie was fast asleep where she sat, her head down in her arms, the bowl of broth pushed to one side.
Biddy felt extremely frustrated, if the truth were told. She could have wept. It was like reading a story with the last page missing. Annie had gone up to her bed in her old room without opening her eyes properly, without even hearing Biddy tell her how she’d kept the bed made up and aired for this very moment.
When she’d cleared away and banked the fire up for the night, she went to bed herself. There was a light showing underneath Mr Armstrong’s door, so it looked as if this could be one of the nights he spent sleeping in his chair by the dying embers of the fire.
Biddy felt personally let down. Things weren’t working out at all in the way she’d dreamed they would. There was Annie upstairs and Mr Armstrong down, with hardly a word exchanged between them since they came into the house.
She set her candlestick down on the high table by her bed, took off her cap and pulled the pins from her hair. At least they were under the same roof again, and this time there was no Mrs Martindale to put a damper on things. The best romances were the ones that took their time – the blossoming of true love couldn’t be hurried. Mr Armstrong had given a meaningful look up at the ceiling when she’d told him that Annie had gone to her bed worn out.
Biddy took off her stays and had a good scratch.
She was sure, positive, that when he raised his eyes like that his expression had been one of utter yearning.
‘Utter yearning,’ she said aloud, liking the sound of the words on her tongue.
The pain in Annie’s ear woke her up around three o’clock in the morning. At once her hand went to her head and she sat up, rocking herself, whimpering till the dagger-sharp agony faded a little.
Gradually, as her eyes became used to the darkness, she made out the shape of the wardrobe, and the tallboy set beneath the window. The blind had been pulled down but she could see the pale yellow outline of the window. There was no fire in the grate, but that last time the flames had touched the walls to a soft rose, and whenever she opened her eyes the animal doctor had been there, waiting and watching, his presence solid and reassuring.
After Kit Dailey and the maid Johnson had almost killed her, Seth had sat in the bedroom at the Grays’ house, watching and waiting in just the same way.
‘I’ll always be there if you want me to be.’ Had he said that, or had she dreamed it?
‘I’ll never forget you,’ Laurie Yates had said. ‘You are so lovely,’ he had whispered as he kissed her.
‘You’re so lovely,’ Seth had said, and his mouth had been hard and demanding on her own.
Annie swung her legs over the side of the bed, lit the candle, held it up – and saw the parcel on the dresser. In the half-light it was a dirty tattered bundle.
‘I hid it from him, chuck. It’s yours. It came in the post. From foreign parts.’
Florrie’s big face was running with sweat as she’d handed the parcel over. Annie could see her now, slopping her untidy way back down the street.
The paper came away easily as she tore at it. It was damp to the touch and smelled of rancid mutton fat. Annie pulled one layer away, then another, and yet a third – then caught her breath in astonishment.
The white lace tablecloth was so fine, so delicate that at first she thought it was a bridal veil. But when she stood up and shook it out she saw the round shape of it, knew that the delicate lace would hang down in perfect folds when it was draped over a rounded table.
‘So Laurie remembered my dream,’ she told Biddy the next morning, holding the lace cloth up for her to admire. ‘It was just a silly daydream really, but he remembered.’
Biddy had no intention of listening to anything good about the travelling man. Mr Armstrong had taken one look at the cloth and gone straight out, calling for his dog in a voice that had it running as fast as if he’d fired a starting pistol.
Biddy told Annie that she bet at least four poor foreign women had gone stone-blind making the lace cloth, and that Laurie Yates would have paid no more than a shilling for it, if that.
‘It’s his conscience talking,’ she said scathingly. ‘He thinks that a handful or two of hand-made lace can make up for all the anguish he’s caused you. If it was mine I would toss it on the fire to show my contempt.’
‘That would show I was still foolish enough to care for him,’ Annie told her, examining the cloth with a critical eye. ‘I think it would come up beautifully if I starched it lightly and pressed it on the wrong side with a hot iron. It would look different again.’
‘Oh, Annie …’
The next minute they were holding on to each other, laughing so much they failed to see Seth watching them from the doorway.
‘You’ve chased the haunting sadness from his face already,’ Biddy told Annie, after he’d gone out.
She thought how beautiful the phrase had sounded when she’d first read it in a story about a scullery maid who had brought joy and love back into the life of an embittered lord of the realm, who owned half of Cumberland, four houses in London and a chain of shops, but who was spiritually as poor as a cripple with a begging bowl.
They worked together through the days, settling back into their old rhythm of Annie doing the bulk of the work and Biddy skiving off to read whenever she got the chance.
Seth came and went from the house, eating alone in his den and twice in that first week not going to bed at all. Annie worried about him, and one dark evening took the swinging lantern down from its nail and walked to the verge of the long garden to see if there was any sign of him coming back down the hill. There was a heavy drizzle in the air, the wetting kind. She couldn’t think why he hadn’t set off for home much earlier as he must have seen the cows lying down in the fields. She had seen them – she had known that rain was on the way.
‘Does he never take any account of the time?’ she asked Biddy.
‘Never.’ Biddy looked up from her book, keeping her finger on her place. ‘Sometimes he doesn’t come home at all.’ She said this for the benefit of seeing Annie’s face change, her expression grow bleak.
‘You mean when he goes to Manchester?’
Biddy excelled herself. ‘Oh, when he goes there he’s often away for as long as a week, coming back mighty pleased with himself.’
‘He has his own life to lead.’
‘And of course he’s a man,’ Biddy said. She glanced down at her book. ‘A virile, handsome giant of a man,’ she read. ‘With passion throbbing in his veins.’
Annie, she noted with immense satisfaction, had gone as red as a new scald.
Seth had found Jake Tomlinson’s cow down with milk fever, though the calf was doing well.
‘The loss of a deep milker like her’ll cripple me financially, Mr Armstrong.’ Jake shook his head mournfully. ‘I can see by the look on th’ face tha doesn’t hold out much hope.’
Seth tried to look more optimistic than he felt. If the animal had been conscious he could have given it a sedative. As it was, he would have to give choral by the rectum. He would also, if necessary, spend the whole day stimulating the cow’s spine with embrocation. It was too late to tell Jake that if his precious cow had been kept on oat-straw and hay for the six weeks prior to calving, this might never have happened. Jake had his own methods and wouldn’t be moved from them, and at the moment his distress was so great that Seth could hardly bear to look at him.
‘D’you reckon she’ll pull through, Mr Armstrong?’
Seth continued his massaging, using long deep strokes in a soothing rhythm. ‘We’re not beaten yet, Jake. Not by a long chalk. You go and do what you’d normally be doing. I can manage on my own.’
He was lying so uncomfortably on the dirt floor that his whole body ached. A draught from the ill-fitting door was the only breath of air in the badly-ventilated cowshed. Jake’s pastures were poorly drained, almost bare of trees, so that his animals found little respite from summer fleas. Yet t
hey thrived, with an inborn capacity for adapting themselves to circumstances, as if knowing how dearly they were cherished. Dearly-loved wouldn’t be too strong a word, Seth supposed.
Twice during that long day Jake’s missus came out with food and drink, and twice Seth refused the food but drank the hot sweet tea laced with sugar. By the late afternoon he was able to tell Jake with truth that the cow was responding. When the shadows lengthened and the drizzle of the day had turned to a good honest rain, he knew the animal would live.
He was so stiff and weary, he stumbled as he walked away from the small farmholding, still hearing Jake’s overwhelming gratitude in his ears. Rain dripped from the overhanging trees which lined his path as he trudged through the mud. He marvelled, not for the first time, at the patience of the farmers and their almost passive acceptance of whatever the weather could chuck at them. With no more needed than a few days of sunshine the corn would be ripe, but only the other day a large flock of swallows had flown over the fields making for the south, at least a month earlier than usual – a bad sign, even to an optimist.
Seth crossed the lane in order to skirt the dark wood, walked on down the familiar road until he turned a corner and saw the lights of his own home, shining out from every single window. Smiling because he knew that Annie was there.
Lying sleepless in her bed that night Annie wished she hadn’t sounded so much like Mrs Martindale, fussing over him, giving him a towel to dry his hair, telling him that she would fill the hipbath, put a handful of mustard in it and leave him to soak away what she was sure could easily be the onset of pneumonia.
‘He’s as strong as an ox,’ Biddy had reassured her. ‘I’ve seen him come in, shake the drops from him, then stand by the fire till his clothes steam-dried. He hated you mothering him. Anger was flashing from his eyes like living sparks, and a pulse was throbbing in his strong jaw.’