The Cuckoo's Child

by Marjorie Eccles

  The shock of losing the master of Farr Clough, the man whose presence had dominated all their lives, had not robbed Amelia of her antagonistic approach. She and Laura met in the hall the next day, where Laura was exchanging a few words with Gideon before he went down to the mill. To all intents and purposes, Amelia seemed to have completely recovered from the hysterics she had fallen into on hearing of the accident at the mill.

  ‘You’ll be leaving us now, then, Miss Harcourt,’ she stated bluntly, without any attempt at finesse.

  ‘The job isn’t finished,’ Gideon said before Laura could reply, looking hard at his mother, ‘and I hope Laura will agree to stay until it is.’

  ‘Oh, we can forget that. Nobody ever bothered with the library before, and I doubt anybody will want to, now. There’s no need for it.’

  ‘On the contrary, it’s something that ought to be completed.’ This unusual show of authority from her son halted Amelia for a moment, then she simply turned and walked away in her usual stiff and unbending manner. ‘Well, will you stay and finish, Laura?’ he asked.

  If that was what he wished, she was willing to do so. ‘I don’t want to upset your mother, but I confess I feel I ought to finish what your grandfather wanted.’

  ‘Who knows what he wanted?’ He shook his head. ‘The truth is, I haven’t the faintest idea. All the same, I reckon sorting those books was long overdue. You’re doing a splendid job, and maybe we can open up the library again and make proper use of it. Please, I hope you’ll stay – and take as long as you like.’

  Facing the garden, and the prospect of the valley below, the library could have been one of the most attractive rooms at Farr Clough, though that was far from the impression it had made on Laura when she first entered it. A pair of library steps, a few straight chairs set around a huge central table as if for a meeting, drugget on the floor and not a picture or an ornament in sight. A tightly buttoned grey and brown tabby plush armchair, looking like an uncomfortable afterthought which had just been brought in, stood near the black marble fireplace in which a fire had been lit, large enough to roar halfway up the fireback when it should get going, though the chimney at that moment had thought otherwise, and was protesting by throwing intermittent billows of smoke into the room.

  Unlike the rest of the house, where Mrs Beaumont’s good housekeeping was so much in evidence, the room had clearly received no attention. It smelled overwhelmingly of musty old books which obviously hadn’t been touched for years. They lay on the shelves anyhow, thick with dust, not always in neat rows with their spines facing outwards, but sometimes stacked in tottering piles, or leaning drunkenly against each other.

  Someone had provided paper, pens and ink, and a large protective apron had also been left on the table. Setting to work, Laura had soon found some of the books almost too big to lift, as if reluctant to relinquish the same positions they’d occupied for generations, their titles as dry and dusty as the books themselves, and their contents surely of no interest to anyone but the scholars who had written them.

  Today, with the fire going nicely, she had decided to forget Amelia Beaumont’s animosity and tackle the last wall of shelves. She was a strange woman, almost impossible to imagine her as the twins’ mother, physically or otherwise, although she might once have been beautiful, or at least striking in a strong, dark, gipsy-looking way. Perhaps they took after their father. No one ever spoke of Theo. There wasn’t a single photograph of him anywhere in the house . . . but then, they didn’t seem to go in much for family photographs – there were some of the twins, principally one with their grandfather, and one of a rather beautiful woman in a ball dress with a long train, holding a fan, with feathers in her hair, who must be Lady Tyas, their great-grandmother.

  Perched on the very top of the library steps, to the accompaniment of sneezes, she was dusting the space left by Delineations, Historical and Topographical, of Yorkshire, asking herself crossly why Mr Beaumont had not simply employed a housemaid to tidy up his old books, when she noticed a roll of paper which had slipped behind the next few books, tied around with a black silk ribbon.

  She descended the steps and untied it, and when she had spread it out on the table and weighted it with books to prevent it curling up again, she found the roll comprised several foolscap pages pinned together, closely written on both sides. The handwriting was backward-sloping, as if the writer might have been left-handed, and it was also embellished with confusing twirls and elaborate curlicues to the downward loops, all of which made it extremely difficult to decipher. After a while she found she was able, with concentration, to see that it appeared to be a work of fiction. Intrigued, and nothing loath to be relieved of her dusty job for a while, she settled down before the fire in the armchair – more comfortable than it looked – to read the rest of the story, the handwriting becoming easier to read as she became accustomed to it. It was dated 1887, and entitled: ‘A FOOL’S PROGRESS’.

  There is an old superstition that says only a fool would venture out toward the Devilstones on the moors on a Friday, especially on Friday the thirteenth. And never in February, when snow is blowing up. Call me a fool right enough, I should have remembered that. I, Ben Kindersley, had known Castleshaw Moor from the hour I first drew breath, and I knew as well as any man living what a God-forsaken spot it can be in February. But I had just reached nineteen and my blood was hot with anger, and I was past reasoning.

  It was but a matter of a basketful of a dozen or so broken eggs, nothing more, that brought things to a climax. Shattered my resolution to stay on the farm until I was twenty-one, by which time I had hoped I should have seen my way clear to be earning a penny for myself and have come to some understanding with my father. But what happened with the eggs altered everything. Big strapping lad that I am, I am sometimes clumsy. Anyhow, I dropped the basket as I passed it into my sister Mary’s hands, and the eggs broke, every one of ‘em, and spread all over the stone flags on the kitchen floor that the girl, Lottie, had just scoured. At which Father turned puce-purple till I thought he would have an apoplexy.

  It wasn’t really the eggs, of course, although we hadn’t so many we could afford to throw them on the floor, and they’d been intended for use in a custard pie and some other celebration dishes that night for my birthday. We’d had words earlier in the day, Father and I, when he’d caught me reading for a few minutes after our dinner at midday, when he thought I should already have been at work again, and I’d forgotten to curb my tongue, and things had been said between father and son that would have been better left unsaid. Afterwards, he turned away in his usual surly manner and went on with what he was doing, and I turned the other way as well, and went on with what I should have been doing, and the matter might have been pushed aside for the time being, as such matters usually were, with things being left unsaid, resentments left unspoken, to simmer and fester, had it not been for what happened later with the eggs. For some reason this simple accident caused me to make another smart retort when Father cursed me for laughing at the mess which the cat, Betty, and the dog, Vixen, were even then making short work of.

  ‘Don’t thee back answer me, tha gurt gormless ‘a’porth o’ nowt!’ he shouted, reverting to the broad accents of his youth, which Heloise had tried so hard to eliminate. ‘Tek thi ’ook, and don’t let me see thee till tha’s come to thi senses!’

  I should not have taken that as I did. I knew well enough that he merely meant that I should get myself out of his sight for a while, find myself a job in the stables, or mending the drystone walls of the sheepfold that were sore in need of attention, anywhere until he cooled down. There was nowhere else I could have gone, save out on the moor, or into the dark space above the hayloft where you needed a candle to see by. We were a crowded homestead and North Brow, once a handloom weaver’s house as well as a farmhouse, was scarce big enough for all of us. Besides myself, my father and my three sisters, there was Lottie, the servant lass, and Ephraim, the cowman. Lottie had a box bed in the kitchen and I
, because there was nowhere else in the house, shared that space above the hayloft with Ephraim. I didn’t object to this, except for his snores after he’d had a sight too much ale on market days. It was quiet, and warm, and I’d fixed myself up a shelf where I could keep the one or two books I had, and where of a night I wrote by candle the bits and pieces I had such hopes of one day. My father alone had a room to himself, the one he’d shared with my mother when she was alive, and later, with Heloise. What had once been the loom chamber with the long window to give light when my grandfather’s father had woven pieces which he carried to Huddersfield Cloth Hall to sell – until the advent of machinery took all the pride and profit out of it – had become the place where my sisters, Prue, and Mary, and Lisbeth slept. Oh, and there was the little corner off the landing with a curtain drawn across it where a bed had been wedged for Lucie Picard. I must not forget Lucie Picard.

  She found me in the stable next morning after that row with my father, long before it was light, rubbing our old mare Nellie’s nose, with my belongings already in the carpet bag, and of course, being Lucie, she knew at once what I was going to do. I should have been a sight more careful, made less noise, doused the lantern.

  ‘Take me with you, Ben.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re running away. I want to run away, too.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, Lucie. I’m off to try for a job on The Manchester Guardian, and if I can’t get one, happen one in Leeds, or even London. What could I be doing with you, there? Besides, I’m walking, and you wouldn’t last five minutes on the moor.’

  ‘We could take Nellie.’

  ‘Nay. I can’t do that. Nellie stops where she is.’

  I won’t deny I had thought of it, but that was as far as I’d got. It would break my heart to leave my patient old friend. We’d known one another since I was a nipper, but pinching a few victuals from the pantry to keep body and soul together was a different matter from making off with Nellie. They’d never manage without her. Leaving the old mare would hurt me almost as much as leaving Lucie – but then, I was going to come back one day for Lucie, though she wasn’t to know that, since I hadn’t told her, for I didn’t know when it would be.

  ‘You’re a hard one, Ben Kindersley.’ That I was not, and well she knew it, and she tried to plead, putting her little hand on my arm, a slip of a thing just gone seventeen years old, with a mane of bright curling hair, looking up at me with those great eyes you could lose yourself in. ‘Please.’

  Lucie was like that – determined to get what she wanted and sometimes wild with it. Well, she was Heloise’s daughter, wasn’t she? But with her it was only because she couldn’t wait to try out the wonderful things she was sure the world was waiting to offer her, whereas Heloise had been sly and calculating and with no intention of trusting to luck – which was how she’d got hold of my father, after our mother died. She had been a governess at a big house in Saddleworth, living a wretched life at the mercy of their cold Christian charity because she had been taken in, along with her fatherless young daughter, and had to pay for their goodness by swallowing slights and insults, which was against any Frenchwoman’s nature. She’d seen her chance and made a beeline for my father, Joe Kindersley, as soon as she’d heard he was a widower. For all she was hard as a flint, she had pretty ways when she wanted to show them. That was how she’d got my father, something he’d come to regret, I know, as we all had – except for the fact that she’d brought Lucie with her. Everybody who knew her loved Lucie, even Prue, to a degree, for she was winning and affectionate. And I? I loved her best of all.

  She put her hand again on my arm ‘Take me with you, Ben, please. I don’t want to stay here, not without you.’

  ‘Nay, Lucie.’ I would not, much as I wanted to. Indeed, I could not.

  I threw her off, with as much roughness as I could summon. I left her in the barn and set off for the last time past the mistle where the beasts were lowing softly, waiting to be milked, and past Vixen in her kennel who strangely made only a faint whimper, as if she knew what I was up to. Once out on the track, I made fair progress, but I hadn’t gone more than a few miles when the snow began, which I much misliked. The moor was no place to be when it snowed. It fell in thick, soft flakes that soon lay on the track like a blanket and settled into the crevices between the black rocks, where if it went on and the wind rose it would soon form itself into drifts that could be up to twice the height of man, as I’d seen many a time. I turned a bend in the track and stopped for a minute for a last look up to the spot where the farm, North Brow, stood gaunt above me now. And there she was, running and struggling and gasping, with naught but her shawl over her head.

  I waited till she reached me, then I took her by the shoulders and shook her till her teeth rattled – Lucie, whom I had never once even raised my voice to before! – and she let me, saying not a word. The wind had brought some colour to her pale cheeks, and tendrils of her bright hair escaped from her shawl, and though she kept her head up, she began to shiver. The rage went out of me as suddenly as it had come, and I took from the carpet bag the waistcoat her mother had stitched (hoping to ingratiate herself with me, I had no doubt) and put it on her, then I took off my coat and draped it round her over that. I had on a thick leather jerkin underneath and I was still warm from my walking, and from my anger, and did not feel the cold, not then. But still, I cursed to myself, knowing what I should rightly do, which was to take her back, while knowing that now I had made my bid for freedom, I could not stomach to slink back, like Vixen with her tail between her legs.

  However, it was either that, or press on, and try to reach the road to Oldham, and thence to Manchester. There was an inn I knew where we might beg some sort of shelter, even in a barn, until the way was passable. But Lucie was spent, and frozen. She had no pattens on, nor even shoes to her feet proper for that weather, so I picked her up, and threw her over my shoulder.

  She was no heavier than any of the sacks of grain and meal I was used to lifting. I could carry a double load, any day, and I’d been familiar with this track ever since I could walk, but what with Lucie, and the carpet bag slung over my other shoulder on Grandpa’s stick, and the conditions underfoot, my foot slipped and in trying not to lose hold of her, I fell heavily. Lucie, my bundle and I landed in a sprawl on the hard ground under the snow. I heard it crack, my leg, and when I tried to stand up, I found it would not bear my weight, and the pain was red-hot in my thigh – as well as another sharp pain somewhere in the region of my breastbone when I drew breath to ask Lucie if she was all right.

  She had sustained no damage, thank God, and was picking herself up even as I asked.

  I broke out in a cold sweat and rued what had brought us into this: my temper, which is slow-burning, but all the hotter for that. Despair threatened to overwhelm me, but it was Lucie then who helped me, giving me her frail shoulder to lean on, as we limped towards what shelter there was by a group of great boulders, Lucie who snuggled up to me to give me her warmth and spread my coat over both of us, Lucie who held me whenever I passed out on another wave of pain, and spoke comfort to me whenever I came round.

  It was there, an hour later, lying in the lee of the rocks, with the snow almost covering us like the babes in the wood, that Ainsley Beaumont found us. He lifted us into his covered trap and took us – not in the direction I had hoped to go, which was where he had come from, having been in Oldham on business the night before, where he had stayed – but along the road towards Huddersfield and his own home, here, to Farr Clough House. I was not conscious of the way we were going, then, and not in any condition to dispute it if I had been. Indeed, I was not conscious of anything much for a long time after that.

  This was almost certainly not fiction. Ben Kindersley and Lucie Picard were real people, and this was their story. Who were they and where were they now? Why had he written, and hidden, this manuscript? Or perhaps it had not been deliberately hidden, but had simply slipped behind the books and been lost. Laura
went on reading, hoping the next pages might tell her more.

  I, who have scarcely had an illness in my life, took a fever occasioned by my cracked ribs pressing on the lung, or so said the doctor that Ainsley Beaumont fetched. There were days and nights when I did not know myself or my surroundings and I am still as weak as a kitten. So here we must remain, I suspect, until this cursed hip of mine heals. It was badly broken and Dr Widdop told me gravely that I must be prepared for the possibility that it will always remain a weakness. I, who have thought naught of walking a dozen miles over the rough moor into Huddersfield, and a dozen miles back, may never be able to walk that far again. Such are the consequences of my temper – for me, and for Lucie. She is very much on my conscience. I have not yet bethought myself what to do about her.

  Mr Beaumont will not hear of us leaving until I can walk at least in some comfort, though he made a stiff business of quizzing me pretty thoroughly as to how the two of us came to be lying out there in the snow.

  ‘So you thought you could just walk into the offices of The Manchester Guardian and present yourself and be taken on, then?’ The idea seemed to offer him some grim amusement.

  ‘I did not expect to be taken on as a journalist, sir, but I was prepared to do any sort of job, only I never reached there.’

  ‘And what possessed you to start out in the midwinter – and you a farmer’s son? I should have thought you’d know the right side of the weather.’

  ‘I’m not that sort of farmer’s son, sir. At least, I know the weather as well as anybody but—’

  ‘All right, all right, I’ve no doubt you had your reasons. But what about the lass? What are you going to do about her? She can’t go with you into the sort of life you have in mind. What thought did you give to her?’

  He cocked a wry eyebrow, and I felt myself flush hotly at what he must be thinking, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the truth, that it was Lucie who had followed me when I left, that she wouldn’t be said nay, that she hated the farm more than I did, or so she said. Well. That was hard, because I didn’t hate the farm, nor anyone in it, not even my father, if it came to that – just the farming way of life, which I was never cut out for, although all the world seemed to be of the contrary opinion, purely on account of my size and the breadth of my shoulders and the muscles that made short work of all the heavy jobs that come with a farm. Whereas all I could see was my life stretching before me, toiling and moiling to little purpose, when all I wanted to do was write about what that good man Parson Havergill and I talked about in those long hours beside his fire, him teaching me my letters and giving me books to study and newspapers to read. ‘You’ll get there one day, lad. Just bide your time, bide your time and pray, and the chance will come when the Lord deems you ready for it,’ he told me. Which advice makes me downright ashamed now to recall, as if I had abused his trust.