The Stony Path

by Rita Bradshaw

  She was alive and Arnold was dead. He couldn’t hurt her ever again but he could hurt Luke. She turned to the wall, pressing her hands against it and then resting her forehead on them as she prayed silently, If You’re there; if You’re really there and all this isn’t just a mistake, just folly, with no rhyme or reason to it, then keep Luke safe. Please keep him safe. And help me to forget. Blank that night from my mind, God, or else I feel I might go mad.

  Chapter Nineteen

  God did not blank the memory of that night from Polly’s mind, but neither did she go mad in the days that followed. Indeed, most of the time she found she was too exhausted to think at all.

  Martha Croft died the morning after the doctor first called at the farm, and old Enoch followed her two hours later. Amazingly, little Ellen rallied, as did Croft’s two other children and Croft himself.

  As Polly had predicted, the disease touched each of the cottages. Three days after Enoch’s death they lost one of his grandsons, but in the next cottage – where each member of the family was in bed for days – everyone slowly recovered. Emily, who had always looked as though a breath of wind could blow her away, threw off the disease quite rapidly and was able to nurse her mother – a big woman who suffered with arthritis – who died within the week.

  In the farmhouse, Polly and Betsy fought first for Ruth’s life and then for those of her grandmother and grandfather. They cat-napped in the kitchen, sleeping in their clothes as they worked on and off twenty-four hours a day. Carrying slops down the stairs, changing endless beds covered in liquid filth, spooning boiled water into the invalids along with perfected beef juice, washing the bedding, nightshirts and nightgowns in the boiler, mangling and drying everything – no mean feat in the depths of winter as the rows of linen strung up in the kitchen testified – with their hands becoming so red and swollen with the constant washing that the pain was only relieved temporarily by sticking them in the snow outside until they were numb.

  Alice was the first to go, just two days after she had first had the diarrhoea. She died peacefully in her sleep, but the shock was too much for Walter and his resulting heart attack was terribly final.

  ‘No, no, Grandda, no.’ From the moment they had been unable to wake Alice, it had been just a few minutes before Walter joined her, and Polly couldn’t take it in as she stared down at two of the people she loved best in all the world. Walter had taken his wife’s hand in his final contortions and now, as she looked at the two hands joined on the counterpane, Polly heard herself crying, ‘Why? Oh, why? It’s not fair!’ through her bitter tears.

  ‘No one could’ve done more for ’em, lass.’ Betsy had come to join her at the bedside. ‘There’s many would’ve put ’em in the workhouse rather than marry a man they didn’t love.’

  Polly was startled into looking at her. ‘You knew?’ she hiccuped on a sob.

  ‘I’m not as daft as I look.’ It was stoical and would have been funny in any other circumstances.

  ‘Oh, Betsy.’

  ‘They were old, lass, an’ worn out as you might say. It was their time.’

  ‘But I don’t want them to go.’ She stared down into the two dear old faces, which death had made look much younger, smoothing out the lines and wrinkles. ‘What will I do without them?’ They had always loved her, unreservedly, unconditionally, and it was only now that Polly knew how much she would miss them.

  ‘You’ll go on, lass.’ Betsy’s voice was soft. ‘That’s your nature.’

  ‘And if I can’t?’ She was tired. She was so, so tired.

  ‘You don’t know the meanin’ of the word.’

  Polly looked at her friend, a long look. ‘You’ll help me lay them out? I want them to be clean, nice, when they come for them.’

  ‘Aye, lass. Of course.’

  Ruth cried when she was told but Polly stayed with her for some time, holding her sister close and soothing her with kindness. She let Betsy tell their mother.

  Over the next three days Polly could see Ruth slipping away from them and she almost lived in her sister’s bedroom, forcing her to drink, keeping her clean, sponging her hot forehead and talking to her incessantly. It was on the fourth night after Alice and Walter’s deaths – and ten days after Ruth had first got the disease – that some pinkness returned to her face and she was able to sleep most of the night through, with Polly holding her hand as she sat in a chair by the side of her sister’s bed.

  Through it all Hilda had stayed in her room, emerging only to hurry down to the kitchen for food and drink, which she had whisked back up to the bedroom, and for visits to the midden with her chamber pot, which Polly had insisted her mother empty herself from the first day the typhoid had hit the farmhouse.

  ‘Poll?’ It was the morning after Ruth was showing signs of pulling through, and Polly was feeding her sister beef juice as Ruth lay propped against the pillows. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you?’ The few hours of uninterrupted sleep in the chair by the bed had made her feel worse, not better, and Polly’s voice was drugged with exhaustion as she said, ‘What for?’

  ‘For . . . for being my big sister, for loving me.’

  ‘Of course I love you.’

  ‘I don’t know why.’ Ruth’s voice was weak but dogged.

  ‘I’ve been horrible to you.’

  ‘No you haven’t.’ And then, as Polly saw Ruth’s eyebrows rise, she smiled and said, ‘Well, maybe you have sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, Poll, I’m sorry.’ Ruth turned her head to the side and bit down hard on her lower lip.

  ‘Don’t be daft.’ As Polly saw tears squeeze from under Ruth’s eyelids she patted her arm, her voice soothing as she said, ‘You’re feeling low, it’s only natural. Give it a couple of days and you’ll be more like yourself.’

  ‘I hope not.’ It was surprising coming from Ruth. ‘I’ve found I don’t like myself very much.’

  ‘Well, it’s only you that can do something about that.’

  ‘I know it.’ Ruth stared at her, the tears continuing to trickle down her white cheeks, which seemed drawn in to her skull with the effects of the illness. ‘I don’t want to end up like Mam, Poll. I can feel meself being like her sometimes – most of the time the last few years – and even though I knew how horrible I was being I didn’t stop. But I will now, I mean it.’

  ‘Good.’ Polly patted her sister’s arm again. Ruth’s eyelids were already closing and she didn’t have the strength of a kitten; sleep was the best medicine at the moment. ‘You have a little nap, I’ll be back shortly.’

  Polly thought about what her sister had said as she walked down the stairs with the tray containing the bowl and towel she had used to wash Ruth’s face and hands before she had fed her. Would Ruth try to change once she was feeling better? People said all sorts of things when they were at death’s door, and Ruth knew she had nearly died, but once the danger was past and things settled down again, memories were selective. Only time would tell.

  For the next few days it seemed as though the farm was in a period of recovery. Ruth slept constantly and barely had the strength to raise herself on her pillows for the beef juice and boiled water and milk Polly insisted her patient swallow every couple of hours, but her sister’s cheeks were regaining some colour and the terrible gaunt, sunken look had left her face, and for this Polly was thankful, even as she grieved for her grandparents every minute she was awake. She and Betsy continued to work like horses, but with the danger past they were able to sleep in their own beds for a few hours each night, which both women desperately needed.

  Hilda still wouldn’t poke her nose out of her bedroom or allow anyone in, scurrying downstairs and then back again like a frightened rabbit when she needed to empty her chamber pot or fetch food. On the fifth day after Ruth’s crisis point had passed, Polly knocked on her mother’s door, saying, ‘There’s no need for you to worry any more; the doctor has just gone and he thinks we are over it.’

  ‘Huh!’ The exclamation was loud and Hilda didn�
�t open her door. ‘Fat lot the quacks know. I remember 1895. They said the same then and that was just before the worst bout hit.’

  ‘As you like, Mother. As you like.’ She didn’t have the time or the inclination to argue with her, Polly thought to herself as she walked downstairs. She couldn’t ever remember feeling such a consuming tiredness as was on her now, although she blessed it in a way. When her head touched the pillow at night she was asleep, and slumber meant the gnawing core of hatred at the centre of her being slept too. Hatred against a dead man; hatred against her husband; against the injustice that had made a beast like Arnold so much stronger and physically powerful than a woman; against the disease that had taken her beloved granny and grandda at a time when she most needed to see their dear faces . . .

  She forced her mind away from such weakening thoughts as she opened the door to the kitchen, but immediately she saw Betsy’s face and Emily sitting at the table, her eyes pink-rimmed, she knew there was further trouble. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Me da.’ Emily sniffed loudly, rubbing the back of her hand across her nose as she said, ‘He’s been bad for days an’ not told anyone, an’ now he’s turnin’ inside out. I’d better get back to him.’

  So her mother had been right after all. Polly stared at the little kitchen maid. It wasn’t over yet.

  It definitely wasn’t over.

  Polly had been planning to move into her grandparents’ room once the farmhouse returned to normal while she thought about what she was going to do in the immediate future. With her grandparents gone she didn’t intend to remain living as Frederick’s wife, but the spectre of Arnold’s body in its icy tomb seemed to dictate that she had to remain where she was at least until it was found and she knew there were going to be no repercussions involving Luke. The way winter had set in, that could be some months away, but she could just about bear staying if she didn’t have to lie next to Frederick each night with just a feather bolster separating her from the man she loathed.

  All through the last three weeks Polly and Frederick had exchanged no more than monosyllables, so at three o’clock that afternoon, when she had just lit the oil lamps in the kitchen where she and Betsy were baking a batch of bread, she didn’t raise her head from arranging the loaf tins along the fender and covering them with clean cloths as Frederick entered from the hallway.

  ‘I’m bad.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bad. I’ve got the skitters.’ All Frederick’s normal heartiness and patronising manner had been swept away, and the man standing in the doorway looked scared to death.

  Polly straightened slowly. She vaguely remembered Frederick using the night closet several times during the night, but such was her exhaustion, she hadn’t been sure if she had just dreamed it when she had awoken in the morning to find him sleeping peacefully on the other side of the bolster. Now, as she looked into her husband’s face – really looked at him for the first time since the night she had staggered into the house wet through and hurting from Arnold’s attack – she thought, He’s got it. I can see it in his face.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ It was a whimper and could have come from a child rather than a man.

  For a moment Polly almost said, ‘Why ask me? You couldn’t wait an extra few minutes for me and because of that I was attacked and raped and murder was done. Don’t ask me what to do because I don’t care,’ but instead she forced herself to say, and calmly, ‘Go to bed, of course.’

  ‘Get the doctor.’

  ‘He will do no more than he has done over the last three weeks and you know it, besides which, he will be here at the end of the week as arranged.’

  ‘Get the doctor!’

  ‘Don’t shout at me, Frederick.’

  It was cold and tight, and for a moment Frederick seemed bereft of speech, but then, possibly because he realised the vulnerable position he was in, he became almost cringing as he said, ‘Please, Polly, please. Get the doctor. I have to see him, I do.’

  ‘I’ll get Croft to send one of the men in the horse and trap.’ It was abrupt. ‘You know about Herbert Longhurst?’

  ‘Aye.’ Again the whimper. ‘I was thinking we’d seen the back of it; he said that, didn’t he? The doctor said that.’

  ‘He was wrong.’ She stared at him and there was a long pause before he turned on his heel and they heard him mounting the stairs at the end of the hall.

  ‘By, he’s fair petrified, lass.’

  Like she had been on that snowy road when she stared into the hot eyes of the man who was going to rape her. Polly turned to look at Betsy, and there was something in the younger woman’s gaze that silenced any further remarks from the housekeeper.

  Dr Braithwaite was not best pleased at being called out to Stone Farm on a bitterly cold night that promised more snow, and he made that plain to his colleague from the gentlemen’s club when he said, his tone irritable, ‘This could have waited until morning, Frederick. I wouldn’t have come but for our friendship. Now, I gather you’re worried you have the fever?’

  Frederick stared first at the doctor standing by the side of the bed, and then at Polly, who was just inside the bedroom door, and as his eyes slowly returned to the doctor, he said, ‘I have it all right, same as Herbert Longhurst. I thought you said we were over the worst?’

  The doctor echoed Polly’s words as he said shortly, ‘I was wrong. Now, you’re in the best place, so just stay there. Boiled water or milk, and keep warm. You’re a big strong man, Frederick, you’ll be all right in time for your Christmas dinner. Now, let’s have a look at you.’

  The examination completed, during which time Polly had walked across the room to stare out of the window with her back to the bed, Dr Braithwaite said quietly, ‘Mrs Weatherburn? You’ve been scouring everything as I said?’

  ‘Yes, I have, Doctor.’

  ‘And the middens? Have the contents been buried as I suggested?’

  Polly turned to look at Frederick; the privies were the men’s province.

  ‘Aye.’ Frederick nodded. ‘Although . . .’

  ‘What? Spit it out, man.’

  ‘Well, the men were tied up with getting the sheep out of the bottom pasture because of the drifts, and you’d said we were over it, so I took the last lot meself to the quarry. The ground’s rock hard for digging.’

  ‘But Herbert Longhurst was going down with it,’ said Dr Braithwaite sharply.

  ‘Aye, well, I didn’t know that, did I? The damn fool never said nowt to no one, not even his own daughter.’

  ‘Did you get any on you?’

  ‘Just a bit on me boots as it went over and a couple of splashes on me breeches. It really needs two to tip it and there was a bit of a wind.’ And then Frederick’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why? Is that how I got it?’

  ‘I told you all that you had to be meticulous where the stools were concerned, as well as everything else. For crying out loud, man!’ And then the doctor took a deep breath and his voice was of a soothing quality when he said, ‘Come on, Frederick. Don’t take on. It’ll be all right.’

  Only it wasn’t.

  The doctor called several times over the next ten days, and although he was consistently bright and cheerful with the patient, his face straightened once he was outside the bedroom. Emily’s father – partly through his own foolishness of trying to carry on when he was so ill, according to the grim-faced doctor – had died within three days, and a distraught Emily was now sharing Betsy’s bed, being unable to face the empty cottage.

  On the tenth morning, the doctor took Polly aside once they were downstairs. ‘He’s not doing too well, I’m afraid,’ he said soberly. That was the thing with this disease: it was no respecter of persons, high or low. Inevitably it first broke out in the dismal wilderness of tenemented property in which mean back-to-back houses had little ventilation or light and sanitary conditions were a practical impossibility, but then the thing could spread like wildfire. In the poorer parts of Sunderland and down by the docks in particular, the overcrow
ding, poverty and consequent ill health made conditions that were ripe for cholera and typhoid, the doctor thought bitterly, and the sailors coming off the boats from foreign parts didn’t make his job any easier. It only needed one with an infectious disease and they were off again. But he’d hoped Frederick’s farm would get off lighter than it had. And now Frederick himself looked to be sinking . . .

  Polly stared at the pleasant-faced man in front of her. Was he saying Frederick was dying? People died of typhoid fever, of course they did, but somehow she had never thought it a possibility with her husband. He was fond of boasting he’d never had a day’s illness in his life and had a constitution like a horse, and he’d never known want or hardship either. Good food from a bairn; this lovely home: he’d been cosseted – aye, that was the word all right – cosseted from the day he was born. If little Ellen Croft could fight the disease and win, surely a big robust man like Frederick could? She said as much to the doctor, who shook his head slowly.