A Child of Secrets

by Mary Mackie

  ‘Looks like him.’ Jess’s heart gave a little chirrup of pleasure at the thought of Rudd waiting for her, expecting her. But then the dog turned and saw them and started to bark so ferociously that Bella drew back, reaching for Jess’s hand.

  It couldn’t be Dash, Jess thought, placing herself in front of Bella. Was it Bracken? Was Jim Potts somewhere nearby?

  The answer came with a low whistle that took the dog wriggling under the stile, out of sight. And away across the field with his master, Jess hoped.

  ‘That’s all right, he’ve gone,’ she said. ‘Let’s hurry. That path to Mr Rudd’s cottage en’t far away.’

  But as she led Bella past the gap where the dog had gone, Jim Potts stepped out from behind the hedge to lounge with arms akimbo on the top rail of the stile, bowler hat on the back of his head, the gap in his teeth showing under the dark curve of his waxed moustache. ‘Afternoon, Miss Bella,’ he greeted. ‘Afternoon, Miss Jess. Lovely day.’

  Jess looked at him askance, hurrying on. ‘Come along, Miss Bella.’

  ‘Wait! I want a word with you.’ As he started to climb the stile, the dog barked. ‘Quiet, dog!’ Potts snarled, and slapped it with the end of a rough lead he had attached to its collar. He quickly tied the string round the stile, and himself leapt over.

  ‘I hen’t got nothin’ to say to you,’ Jess said, backing off, keeping between him and Bella. ‘D’you now leave us alone, or…’

  ‘I on’y want a word,’ he assured her. ‘That ’on’t take a minute. Here, Miss Bella, see what I got here?’ He tipped off his hat in the manner of a conjuror, carefully cradling the contents as he displayed them to Bella – six olive-green partridge eggs. Laying the hat in the grass, he grinned at Bella, ‘Do you look after them for me whiles I talk to Miss Jessie. We ’on’t be long. And don’t worry about old Bracken. He ’on’t hurt you. His bark’s wholly worse’n his bite. Now…’ He laid hold of Jess’s arm, pulling her away.

  Jess resisted, warning, ‘I’m now on my way to see Mr Rudd. He’re expectin’ me. He might come lookin’ for me.’

  ‘Then be a good mawther and listen!’ He dragged her with him until, several yards from Bella, he released her arm and spitted her on a hard green glance. ‘Is that right, what you told ’Liza about that blasted preacher? He’re married?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘And she en’t the first woman he’ve led astray?’

  ‘Not by a long chalk!’

  ‘I see. Well… he’ll be sorry, then. We’ll see to him, don’t you fret. On’y, I en’t about to stand by and see him sent down for murder. A gaol sentence is one thing. Hangin’s altogether another. So you ought to know… our ’Liza was with him that night. He wan’t nowhere near your Matty. Look, Jess… Your Matty was all right. I know he talked to Rudd, but he could a said a lot more’n he did. He could a got us in a lot o’ trouble. So, whatever you might think, I wouldn’t a seen him harmed. It was him comin’ at us with a gun that done it. You start usin’ firearms, things get serious – folk get killed.’

  What was he saying – that Matty had gone after him and his poacher mates that night? ‘Matty never had no gun! Where’d he get a gun?’

  ‘Search me. But he had one. He damn near done for Mr Haverleigh – the bullet went through his coat.’

  Shock held Jess pinned where she was, like a butterfly on a board. ‘Mr Ashton Haverleigh? He was with you… poaching?’

  His face darkened as he grabbed hold of her again and pushed her against a tree. ‘You repeat this and I’ll deny it. You hear? I’m on’y sayin’ it because you’ve a right to know. Yes, it was Ashton Haverleigh. He wrestled with Matty. Got the gun off him. Shot him – before we could stop him. It was all confused, in the dark and the snow… We scattered and I saw Matty fall and that’s all I know. I hen’t seen Haverleigh since. Nor don’t I want to see him ever again, blasted madman. And that’s all I’m sayin’, now or any time.’

  Twenty-Eight

  Having tossed his news into Jess’s startled face, Jim Potts strode back to where Bella was sitting on the grass. He scooped up his hat and vanished over the stile. Him, and his dog, and the partridge eggs.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jess soothed Bella, stroking her dishevelled hair and brushing grass from her white skirts. ‘He din’t hurt me. Nothin’ to fret about. Let’s go see Mr Rudd.’

  She had to keep calm, for the child’s sake, but inside her sickness broiled. Could she believe Jim Potts? Was Ash Haverleigh the guilty one? It had sounded like the truth, but… how could it be true? Matty had used a shotgun, ’times, when he worked with Rudd. But this had been a pistol. Where would Matty have got a pistol?

  Only the ‘grinning boy’, Bob Gooden, was at the cottage, sitting on the front path scrubbing out hen coops in the company of a lively terrier. In the pens, broody hens sat contentedly in their coops, incubating pheasant eggs. Rudd and Obi had gone down to the rearing field, the boy said; they had taken the most recently hatched poults with them on the donkey-cart.

  The rearing field lay half a mile away in an open, gladed area of the wood. Shrubs and rough grass, providing cover for the young birds, were enclosed by a wire fence. ‘High enough so the poults don’t fly over it too soon,’ Jess explained to Bella. ‘They don’t fly very high, or very far, ’til they’re a bit older, and then they’re put in the woods to roam free.’ She hadn’t forgotten the lessons Rudd had taught her that first magical summer, before Merrywest turned up and spoiled everything. It all seemed so long ago, like another life. Now she came back with new burdens on her mind, a feeling of wretched helplessness.

  When she saw Rudd, behind the wire fence, busy about his work, only willpower prevented her from crying out and running to him.

  Dash was waiting patiently outside the gate, though he got up, wagging his tail in pleasure as they appeared. Inside the pen, chicken coops faced all directions, with foster-hens poking their heads out between the slats while their broodlings scampered about the grass, or chased back to Mother at the first sign of danger. By a rough hut where one keeper always spent the night during the raising season, Rudd and Obi were busy sieving hard-boiled eggs and chopping cooked rabbit meat for the poults. The aroma of the food hung appetisingly on warm air thick with midges.

  Just as Jess and Bella arrived, a flurry of young poults all took flight, tiny wings whirring madly as they lifted a few feet, sailed a few yards, and landed exhausted, test flight over for that day. The sight made Bella laugh and clap her hands, drawing Rudd’s attention, and Jess saw his swift smile of pleasure.

  ‘Come on in,’ he bade them. ‘Don’t let Dash in, though.’

  Jess obeyed, and watched as Rudd showed Bella how the food was prepared then let the child help him scatter it. She made a quaint sight in her pure-white mourning dress with her bright hair flowing down her back and tiny birds pecking about her feet.

  But to Jess the sunlit day was overlaid by a picture of a dark night, snow falling fast, Matty and Lily parting in anger. Had Matty, patrolling the woods only a short while later, come across a gang of poachers, one of whom had proved to be his hated rival Ashton Haverleigh?

  Obi, off back to his cottage to fetch a fresh bag of biscuit and his evening snap – he being on duty that night – wondered if Bella would like to take a ride in the cart with him and say hello to his wife. Bella would, and since it was a means of keeping the child’s mind off the horrors of the day, Jess agreed she might go.

  ‘On’y, sit you still and do what Mr Obi say,’ she added as Bella ran off beside the dour, loping man.

  Rudd breathed a soft laugh, his eyes merry as he lounged against a trestle.

  ‘Somethin’ funny?’ Jess asked, ready to bridle. This was not the first time someone had laughed when she spoke Obi’s name.

  ‘No, lass. Nothing at all. Except… it always makes me smile to hear you call him “Mr Obi”. Happen I should have said before – his name’s Joybell. Peter Joybell.’

  ‘Then why do you call him…’
r />   ‘They called him that long before I came here. It’s because he’s always so solemn and mournful, and with a name like Joybell… “Oh, be joyful” Joybell. Oh, be – Obi.’

  At any other time, Jess might have laughed. Now, the joke struck her as meaningless. ‘I see.’

  The amusement in him died as he scanned her face and noted her tension. ‘You know we’ll be alone now, till Obi gets back? Don’t you want to run after Miss Bella?’

  ‘She’ll be all right.’

  ‘Aye, she will. But will you, alone with me?’

  Wrapping her arms around herself, Jess moved a little away, watching the feeding poults. ‘Don’t laugh at me, Reuben.’

  ‘I’d never do that,’ he assured her softly. ‘Happen I’m just happy to see thee. Whatever the reason that brought thee.’

  ‘I en’t sure why I came. I wanted to talk to you, but…’ It was no good, she couldn’t keep it to herself: ‘We met Jim Potts on the way. He now say that was Mr Haverleigh as killed Matty.’

  Rudd came off the trestle as if stung. ‘Haverleigh?’

  ‘So he say.’

  She told him what had happened, in detail, leaving nothing out, ending with a tear trickling down her blotched face and her eyes huge and sad: ‘On’y, we can never prove it, can we? Jim Potts’ll deny it all, and who’d believe Mr Haverleigh was out with a lot of poachers? And… where’d the gun come from, Reuben?’ Shaking herself, she looked away again, tightening the hold she had on herself.

  ‘Here, come and sit down, lass.’ Laying his arm around her, he led her into the hut.

  The hut was a rough affair with a single door, a small window, a table, two chairs, and a truckle bed where Rudd made Jess sit down. A pot-bellied stove gave off a fair heat and the kettle hanging over it soon began to sing when Rudd placed it on the hob.

  Jess took off her bonnet and fiddled with her hair, saying distractedly, ‘I was sure Merrywest done it. That would’ve made sense.’

  ‘Doesn’t this make even better sense?’ Rudd asked. ‘Haverleigh was jealous. Lost his head when he ran up against Matty. Happen the gun was his, too. In the dark, Jim Potts could have mistaken what he saw.’

  ‘Aye, happen,’ she wearily echoed his phrase. Her head seemed to be going round in circles.

  ‘We ought to tell the police,’ Rudd said. ‘Potts might deny what he told you, but we ought to find out. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Oh… I dunno, Reuben. I don’t know nothin’ no more.’

  ‘Then leave it to me. I’ll go and tell the constable what Potts said. If it’s not true, Mr Haverleigh ought to be given the chance to deny it, I reckon.’

  ‘Mebbe so,’ Jess sighed, too tired to think.

  Rudd poured some of the kettle’s contents into two tin mugs – it was tea, boiled up with milk and sugar and left to stew all day. Still, it helped, somehow.

  Holding the hot mug, Jess stared down into the trembling liquid, saying, ‘Eliza must’ve told her brother I was anxious to know who… I mean, about Matty.’ She shrugged, twisting her mouth awry. ‘Poor Eliza.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’d got it into her head the preacher’d marry her – until I told her he already have a wife.’

  Under his breath, Rudd whistled to himself.

  ‘I en’t proud o’ myself for that,’ she added, her voice thick. ‘I was glad to hurt her. Wickedly glad. But then…’ She held the mug tighter, feeling its heat start to burn her palms, welcoming the pain as she closed her eyes tightly and said through her teeth, ‘I am wicked, Reuben.’

  She felt him sit down beside her, making the truckle bed sway and creak. ‘I don’t believe that, lass.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ she said with a choked laugh, ‘I can regret wantin’ to hurt Eliza’s feelin’s, but some things I en’t sorry for at all. When I think about Merrywest… Lord, I wish I’d killed him. I still wish I’d done it! I know that’s wrong and wicked and sinful, but blast! if I’d a managed it a lot of this grief wouldn’t never have happened!’

  With the door wide open they could clearly hear the poults chirping, the hens clucking, the songbirds singing. Rudd’s silence strummed louder than the sounds of nature as he leaned across and took the hot mug from her, reaching to set it on the table. He said, ‘It’s true, then. You did…’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Her voice was hoarse but calm, belying the turmoil inside her. ‘Yes, I tried to kill him. I wished him dead. Then, and now. I still wish him dead, Reuben. Because of him…’ Taking a long breath, she lifted sore eyes to look out of the window at the moving trees and the bright clear sky. ‘He killed my mother,’ she said, and heard him catch his breath. ‘Oh, not with a knife, or a gun, or anything as sure as that. Nothing you could prove. But he was the cause of it, all the same.’

  Once she had begun, the rest just flowed out.

  After ‘Hardlines’ Henefer drowned, Jess’s pregnant mother had struggled to bring up a family of five – soon to be six – on her own. Still a young and handsome woman, Sarah Henefer had taken in washing and sewing, working all hours for pennies, determined to manage. Young Matty’s earnings from fishing had helped, little as it was, and Fanny had found work in a shop, and then Jess, at the age of twelve, had gone as daily maid-of-all-work to Butcher Bone and his wife. But there had been Sam and Joe to feed and clothe, too, and the latest baby, Sarah-May, until she died of diphtheria.

  Merrywest had been their landlord. He owned several properties around the North End of Lynn and he was a strong voice at the chapel the Henefers attended. He took particular interest in the widowed Sarah and her family, often calling round to make sure they had all they needed, and urging the younger ones, especially Fanny and Jess, to attend Sunday school and Bible classes and hymn-singing nights. Jess became a Sunday school helper, telling Bible stories and teaching the youngest ones simple, happy songs. Merrywest made her feel as if she was of real use. She admired him, looked up to him as a kind of second father.

  Her sister Fanny had been planning to marry ‘Sprat’ Fysher when she turned twenty-one. However, with Fanny’s twentieth birthday only just past, Mother decided it was time the pair were wed; the ceremony took place without delay. Everyone, including Jess, assumed that Fanny had got herself into trouble – a common enough reason for a rushed marriage.

  But Jess, and the rest, were wrong: it wasn’t Fanny who was pregnant.

  Jess shared her mother’s bed and one night, soon after the joy of Fanny’s wedding, she woke up to find herself wallowing in warm stickiness. Black stickiness, so it seemed until she crawled out of bed and with shaking fingers lit a candle. Then, the thick wetness, coating her and the bed, footmarked on the floor, showed itself to be blood-red. Her mother was lying in a pool of it. It was pulsing out of her.

  Jess remembered her mother’s face, blue-shadowed and deathly white as she clutched her stomach, writhing in pain, gasping, ‘Forgive me, Jess. Forgive me. Take care of yourself, girl. Don’t trust nobody. Not nobody! Understand me?’ Jess’s arms had borne the marks of her mother’s dying grip for weeks.

  She’d been old enough to guess what had happened, but if she had any doubts the gossips had soon told her – Sarah Henefer, the respectable widow, had been in sin with a man and had tried to rid herself of the unwanted bastard that would bring shame and disgrace on her name. She must have been to one of the backstreet quacks who did the service, or perhaps she’d used a knitting needle. Whichever it was, she’d paid the price. The Fyshers were among the worst of the critics: no wonder Sarah had wanted her Fanny safely married before the scandal broke, they said; they were respectable folk – they might not have wanted the daughter of a whore in their family. Well, Fanny was now a Fysher, and she must behave like a Fysher and have nothing more to do with ‘that woman’s’ family.

  Rudd had listened this far in silence. Now he said, ‘They surely didn’t blame you for it? You and the boys?’

  ‘They did,’ Jess answered thickly. ‘For a time, they did. There wan’t many folk stuck by
us, except…’ The memories had been dark, but now they grew darker, clouded with hate and self-disgust.

  Jess and Matty had decided to bring up the young ’uns between them. He’d found work anywhere he could, while Jess scrubbed, cleaned, cooked, sewed, scrimped and saved. Fanny was too scared of her in-laws to help openly, though she did keep in touch, on the sly. The only adult Jess felt able to turn to was her Sunday school superintendent, the kindly, caring, sweet-promising Preacher Merrywest. He comforted her, and cajoled her to stay and talk after Bible classes, alone with him in the upper room they used for meetings.

  ‘He used to do that,’ she recalled. ‘Kept his favourites behind – the girls, anyhow. I envied them. I wanted to be one of them. On’y then I found out what he used to make them do, in the little back room where they kept the song-sheets and the banners.’

  Rudd looked sick, his freckles standing out and his eyes darting with anger. ‘Bloody hell!’

  She didn’t need to go into detail, thankfully – there was much she could never say, even to him. How Merrywest had persuaded her to allow him deeper and deeper intimacies, assuring her that Lord Jesus himself wanted her to do it, and after he ravished her he silenced her with threats, and forced her to go on meeting him and ‘serving the Lord’ as he called it; it was a penance she had to pay for tempting him. On Sundays his sermons had held further threats, his thundering voice blasting down at her, his black eyes searing her soul.

  One night, after a huge rally when success made him feel all-powerful, he boasted about his conquest of Sarah; he told Jess how he’d threatened to put up the rent beyond her means unless the comely widow allowed him sexual favours. Jess fought him off then and screamed that she’d never let him touch her again. So he forced her, made her do unspeakable things, raped her with more violence than he’d ever used, and left her bloodied and sobbing.