The Stony Path

by Rita Bradshaw

  When Ruth went to take the baby from her, Polly shook her head, unable to speak, and she still continued to weep when Ruth brought Luke into the room. He simply held mother and child close as he sat on the bed, aware that something deep inside Polly which had been damaged and torn and buried had been brought into the light and was now able to heal fully at last. He touched the baby’s face lightly, grateful that the tiny girl-child was the image of her lovely mother, and when minute fingers fastened on his thumb he felt something stir in his own heart for this tiny, helpless scrap of humanity.

  ‘I want to keep her.’ It was a whisper. ‘I want to keep her, Luke, but not here. I want a fresh start for the three of us.’

  There was a question in the words and Luke answered it with ‘Whatever you want, my love.’ He’d been so scared as the hours had dragged by that he was going to lose her, that in the bringing forth of the child which had been forced upon her Polly would lose her life. He had been knotted up with sick anxiety and frustration – and, aye, and hate, he acknowledged silently – but now, as he looked down into the tiny face, a great weight was lifted off his heart. He could love this innocent life, love her as his own daughter. The biological side of things was nothing, any animal could procreate. What was important was what happened after the birth process, and he would make sure everything which happened was good. He hugged Polly and the child closer as he whispered, ‘The moon, the stars, just name what you want and I’ll get it for you. I promise.’

  Polly gave a little gurgle of laughter, nestling against the hard, strong bulk of him, and almost in the same moment Hilda’s voice came from the doorway, saying, ‘And you say that bairn isn’t his!’

  ‘Get out of here, Mam.’ Ruth had appeared behind Hilda, Betsy at the side of her. ‘You’ve done enough damage.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Luke rose from the bed, ignoring Polly’s urgent ‘Please, Luke, leave it. She’s not worth it.’ He walked slowly up to Hilda, thrusting his face close to hers as his narrowed eyes raked her defiant face. ‘Polly’s baby is mine, but not in the way your cesspit of a mind thinks,’ he said quietly. ‘In every way that really counts the bairn’s mine because of my love for the exceptional lady who’s her mother. And that’s what sticks in your craw, isn’t it – that Polly is special, special and loved, whereas you are a dried-up stick of a woman who’s never been any good to anyone.’

  ‘How dare you!’ As Hilda’s hand rose, Luke made no attempt to avoid the slap she delivered across his face, but when she went to repeat it, he said quietly, ‘I wouldn’t if I were you. I owe you that one for telling you the truth you’ve tried to avoid for years, but although I’ve never raised my hand to a woman in my life, I’d be prepared to make an exception with you.’

  ‘You! You . . . low, ignorant, coarse individual!’ Hilda was spluttering. ‘I’ll see my day with you, with the pair of you! You see if I don’t!’ And then, to her utter outrage, she found herself being frogmarched out of the bedroom by an indignant Ruth and Betsy, who were determined that Polly and Luke should have a minute or two alone.

  Luke walked back to the bed, holding Polly close again until Ruth and Betsy came bustling in and shooed him out. Polly caught at his hand as he left, her voice soft as she said, ‘Come back soon.’ All this with her mother had upset her more than she’d have expected.

  ‘Try and keep me away.’

  ‘Aye, well, she won’t be movin’ out of that bed for three weeks an’ more,’ Betsy said stolidly as she flapped at Luke’s departing back. ‘The midwife says complete rest for at least that long.’ The midwife had also said it would be a miracle if the bairn pulled through, but then she didn’t know their Polly, Betsy told herself silently. And the wee babby herself might be tiny, but the way she’d pulled at her mam’s breast soon after birth, she had all of Polly’s will power and then some.

  ‘What are you going to call her?’ Luke turned in the doorway and looked across at mother and baby as the thought occurred to him. And then he smiled, inclining his head in understanding as Polly said simply, ‘Alice.’

  Over the next few days, as Polly began to slowly recover her strength, Ruth was never far from her. Her sister was utterly besotted with her tiny niece, possibly because little Alice seemed determined to have a shot at the perfect infant award – sleeping, waking and feeding on cue, and rarely crying. Although alert when awake, the baby was also very peaceful, something Polly found quite amazing in view of the traumatic pregnancy.

  Ruth had got upset when Polly had confided her new plans for the baby, which meant her niece would be taken away from the farm. ‘But can’t you stay here?’ she had begged tearfully. ‘Luke would be happy wherever you’re happy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be happy here, Ruth.’

  ‘And you don’t want to sell the farm? It is yours, Poll. It would mean Luke would never have to go down the pit again and you could buy a nice house—’

  ‘Ruth, face facts.’ Polly had cut her sister off before she could continue further. ‘The terms of the will state that Alice inherits everything, not me. This place will be held in trust for her until she is older, and that is fine – I don’t want it and I couldn’t bear to live here, but this way my mother can’t throw her weight about and dismiss Betsy or anyone else who crosses her. Everyone’s jobs are safe and Croft will carry on managing everything as he has done in the past, with monthly reports to me wherever I live. The bank balance is already rising rapidly, so there’ll be no shortage of cash for you and everyone else.’

  ‘I don’t care about that. It will just be so awful without you and Alice.’

  ‘But you know how Luke and I are going to be placed,’ Polly said gently. ‘There’ll be little money for anything with what Luke earns. I shall take an allowance from the farm profits for Alice’s education and so on, but that’s all.’

  ‘But Polly, that’s daft, it is really. You said that at the end Frederick was trying to tell you something. It could have been about the will.’

  ‘And it might not. There was all that about a box, but the will was with the solicitor, now wasn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, Polly!’

  That conversation had been on the afternoon following the day Alice was born, and exactly seven days later, early in the morning of Sunday the twenty-third of June, Polly awoke from a long, involved dream with her heart thudding and her mind crystal clear. Why had she never understood before? she asked herself dazedly. How could she not have realised what Frederick was trying to tell her? But she had been sick in body and mind at the time, just coping one moment to another had been all she could manage, and once he had died and she had found out she was with child everything else had got put to one side.

  She climbed carefully out of bed and was almost to the door of her room when she turned back and lifted Alice from her wicker crib. Somehow, with her mother in the mood she had been in since the birth of the child, she didn’t want Alice out of her sight. Was she saying she thought her mother would harm her own granddaughter? she asked herself as she padded silently across to the door. She didn’t know and she didn’t really want to think about it; she just knew she had to keep the baby with her at all times until she was out of this place. And that couldn’t come soon enough for her.

  Ruth was lying on top of the covers on her bed in her lawn nightdress, one arm flung across her face. She was sleeping peacefully until Polly gently touched her arm, whereupon her sister gave an almighty start that frightened them both. ‘Polly?’ Ruth peered at her in the burgeoning light, sitting up in bed with one hand to her racing heart. ‘What are you doing out of bed? You know what the midwife said.’ And then, as a thought occurred to her, ‘Is Alice all right?’ she asked urgently.

  ‘Aye, yes, and keep your voice down or you’ll wake her and she’ll start bawling. I just want to talk to you.’

  ‘Now?’ Ruth’s tone made it clear how she viewed the early-morning visit. ‘Polly, you shouldn’t be up. The midwife said—’

  ‘Fiddle the midwife.’ Polly sat
down on the coverlet with Alice cradled in her arms. ‘Look, it’s just come to me – don’t ask me why – but I think I know what Frederick was trying to say when he was dying. I came in one day unexpectedly and thought he’d fallen out of bed, but I think he was trying to get to the box he spoke of. The rug by the side of the bed was moved and there was a broken floorboard; I think it’s under there, the box.’

  ‘Oh, Poll.’ Ruth’s voice was soft now, with a touch of deference in its quietness. ‘You think he’d got a bit put away?’

  ‘He didn’t like banks. He told me that before we were married. Only money you could see in your hand meant anything, he said, and land, and bricks and mortar. And there was hardly anything in his bank account, you know that, and just in the last months it’s doubled. He only ever banked a fraction of the profits, Ruth. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Get Mother out of that room and have a look,’ Polly said grimly. ‘Now, today.’

  ‘You don’t think she’s found it?’

  The same thought had occurred to Polly and it made her feel sick. ‘I hope not, but there’s only one way to find out.’ The blood was singing through Polly’s veins and she felt so excited she didn’t know how to contain herself. ‘Look, we’re going to need Betsy’s help, so go and have a word with her and Emily now. Tell her to say she noticed one of the cats in Mother’s room and she thinks it’s infested with fleas, and she’ll strip the bed and scrub the floorboards – something like that. With this hot weather it needs to be done straightaway, before the room’s alive. You know what Mother is like over fleas and bed bugs and the like.’

  ‘All right.’ Ruth was out of bed in a twinkling, returning a few minutes later as Polly was feeding her daughter. ‘It’s all arranged,’ she said with a high, nervous giggle. ‘Oh, Poll.’

  Betsy had no trouble at all in persuading Hilda out of the suite of rooms and down to the sitting room once she’d mentioned the dreaded word ‘infestation’. Since the typhoid, Hilda had become positively paranoid about cleanliness – insisting all water and milk was boiled, washing her hands umpteen times a day and taking all matters of a sanitary nature to excess.

  Once the sitting room door had closed behind her mother and Emily was posted as lookout at the top of the landing, Ruth went into Polly’s room, where her sister was lying in bed, the bassinet to the side of it.

  Polly’s cheeks were flushed with their first real colour since the exhausting confinement, and as Ruth nodded across at the bright blue eyes, Polly slid quickly out of bed, gathering Alice to her a moment later. The three hours which had elapsed since the women had made their plans had seemed like three days, but now the moment was here, Polly was suddenly scared to death. What if she was wrong? What if Frederick hadn’t been trying to let her know about some secret hoard he’d hidden away? He had always insisted that while the farm made little actual profit it enabled family and workers alike to live very well, and that was enough, but she didn’t believe that any more, not after the steady profit of the last months. No, she was right about the box, she knew she was. Pray God her mother hadn’t found it first.

  They flitted across the landing and into the extended part of the house like will o’ the wisps, to find that Betsy had already stripped the bed and hung the mattress out of the window. ‘Just in case she comes back for anythin’,’ Betsy whispered as Ruth closed the door behind them. Polly’s legs were shaking and she sat on one of the easy chairs Betsy drew forward for her before pulling the heavy, thick rug to one side. They all stared down at the innocuous floorboards, the one with the great chip out of it riveting their gaze.

  ‘By, lass, I don’t mind tellin’ you I’ve had the skitters since Ruth come in an’ woke us up this mornin’,’ Betsy murmured softly, ‘but it all fits, you know. Croft’s said many a time on the quiet he reckons the master’s got a bit salted away. He’s not as daft as he looks, Croft.’

  ‘Go on, Betsy. Try and lift it up,’ Polly said quietly, hugging the sleeping baby against her swollen breasts. Alice was due for a feed, and in spite of the fact that Polly was still bleeding quite heavily and felt incredibly tired, she was producing an abundance of milk, which Alice took with relish. ‘But quietly, mind,’ she warned. ‘Mother’s got ears like cuddy-lugs.’

  The floorboard took a little prising, but then it was up, and the three women peered into the hole. There it was, a large tin box – too large to extract through the space.

  ‘Perhaps the other floorboards lift away now?’ Polly whispered softly. They did, and then Betsy and Ruth between them heaved the box on to the bedroom floor. Polly handed Alice to Ruth, then knelt down on the floor and reached out a hand to lift the lid of the box. There were numerous little cloth bags inside, all secured with string, perhaps two dozen or more, along with some documents tied with faded ribbon. Polly opened one and then tipped the shining contents into her lap. Some fifty or so gold sovereigns clinked a sound that was sweeter than any music.

  ‘Eee, lass, lass.’ Betsy’s round eyes nearly popped out of her head. ‘The crafty old so-an’-so; who’d have thought it?’

  ‘Oh, Polly, you were right, you were right.’ Ruth’s body had gone limp; only her arms remained fixed round the tiniest member of the quartet, who was blissfully unaware of the drama being enacted in front of her.

  Polly herself said nothing, just stared at the rows and rows of neat little bags as her heart thudded and reverberated against her ribcage. There was a fortune here, a small fortune. Years and years and years of careful saving, possibly begun by Frederick’s father before him. And he had wanted her to have it at the end, he had. She was his legal wife, and although when she had married him she hadn’t thought about inheriting his wealth, the farm would have been hers but for her mother’s scheming.

  She picked up the bundle of documents and untied them. There were his father’s two marriage certificates and what looked like a couple of Sunday school awards for Frederick, along with three documents relating to the purchase of land as the farm had grown. One was in Frederick’s father’s time, another related to the old Nicholson property Frederick had acquired, and the third – the third was an independent summary of what her grandfather’s farm had been worth when Frederick had taken it over. And it was more, much more, than Frederick had led them to believe.

  Polly sat back on her heels, stunned. He had cheated them, Frederick had cheated her grandparents out of their rightful due. Her grandda and gran could have sold the farm and had plenty of money to pay off their debts and buy a little house somewhere, perhaps with a garden where they could have kept a goat and a few chickens. Who had he bribed to keep quiet? And how could he? How could he have done that to two old people who had never wished him a day’s harm in their lives?

  ‘What is it, lass? What’s the matter?’ As Betsy’s anxious voice penetrated her stupor, Polly silently took Alice from Ruth. She passed her sister the document, and then, as Ruth scanned the written page, explained to both of the women what it meant.

  ‘The mean old blighter!’ Betsy’s head wagged with indignation. ‘But I wouldn’t put anythin’ past him now, lass. All this money up here an’ all any of the workers got at Christmas was a few bits of groceries. They improved once you come, I can tell you! By, you live an’ learn, you do straight.’

  Aye, you lived and learned all right. Polly thought back again to the horror of her wedding night, the brutality and degradation she’d suffered and the misery that had unfolded from that time. Of the numerous slurs and insults she’d endured in this house, and the constant fight she had engaged in to hold her head up high and not be browbeaten either by circumstances or by her husband and her mother. And Arnold, the vicious lies he had spread about her, the stain he had attempted to smear on her reputation – him, the lowest, the most base of individuals. Oh, you lived and learned all right.

  She breathed in deeply, her head rising and her deep blue eyes looking round the room as she exhaled. But the cruel and the deprave
d and the liars didn’t always win. She thought of Luke, how he had been the night before when he had visited the farm, and the sweet, tender and wonderful things he had said to her, things she would carry in her heart to her dying day. And she glanced down at her precious daughter, at the blessing which had been so unexpected and was now so treasured. And then her gaze took in Ruth and Betsy, their faces concerned for her because of their love. Real love. She was so rich. Forget this box and all it held; she had been rich beyond measure before this.

  ‘Can you carry the box into my room?’ she asked Betsy and Ruth. ‘I’ll check with Emily that the coast is clear first.’