by Mary Mackie
Unbelievably, it was his wife who had come to help her, to wash her clean and soothe her hurts. His wife knew about his depravities. She was just too afraid to go against him. Jess had pleaded with her to tell, but Mrs Merrywest only shook her head and wept.
Then had come the night of the fire – the sudden conflagration in the corn warehouse on the docks, when half the people of Lynn had turned out to watch. That was when Jess had seen Merrywest standing by the edge of the dock, with the ship rearing above him, swinging in the wind. The flare of the fire had joined the scarlet rage in her head and all she had thought was that she wished Merrywest dead. So she pushed him, saw him fall, heard him scream. And then she ran for her life, not caring where she went…
* * *
At some point during her tale, Jess drank her tea, welcoming its warmth and milky sweetness. Now she stared down into the empty mug, clutching it so hard her knuckles were white. Her head felt blocked with tears that wouldn’t come. She only felt numb, and dirty, and ashamed. She wanted to get away from there; she couldn’t bear having Rudd look at her, knowing.
‘I wish you’d told me before,’ he said.
‘I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell nobody. I could hardly even bear to think about it. Most of all I was scared Matty might find out. If he’d a known, he might’ve…’ But her silence hadn’t saved Matty, had it?
That thought brought tears brimming. Aware that Rudd was about to take hold of her, she thrust the empty mug at him and leapt up, rushing out of the hut. The sun’s brightness hurt her eyes, made her pause, and when Rudd’s hand came on her arm she flinched away, not daring to look at him and see the revulsion she was sure would be on his face. ‘No, don’t. Don’t touch me, Reuben. How can you touch me when you know—’
‘How can I not?’ he asked, taking hold of her more firmly. ‘I love you, Jessie. If I’d known—’
She braced her hands against him to keep him away, her head averted. ‘You don’t understand! Maybe I did lead him on. Maybe I did give him reason to think I was willin’. I can’t remember. All I know is, ever since that happened I don’t feel clean. However hard I scrub, the dirt’s still there. He turned me into a whore, Reuben. He turned me into a murderess! I en’t worth nothin’ no more. I’ll never be a proper woman because I can’t never let a man touch me. I can’t, Reuben. Every time I even think about it, I see him – I feel the pain inside me, and my head feel as if that’s goin’ to burst wide open with fear and shame and hate and—’
‘Jessie!’ Throwing his arms round her, he held her tightly to him, held her despite her resistance. She had curled up, her hands in fists, her arms wrapped up across her chest, her head down, her whole small body rigid.
‘You can fight me all you like,’ Rudd said hoarsely. ‘I’ll not give in, lass. I’m a patient man, tha knows. And if tha doesn’t know, then I’ll prove it to thee a dozen times over, however long it takes.’
‘No,’ she muttered.
‘Yes!’ he answered, his arms tightening even more as he bent his head to mutter in her ear. ‘Dust tha not know I’ve been waitin’ on thee, bidin’ my time, for over two years? Ever since I picked thee up out of the brambles and carried thee back to the rectory, a little bit of a thing, all hurt and frightened. All prickles, like a hedgepig. You puzzled me, lass. Intrigued me. I’ve not understood thee, until now. But now I know, I can fight it. And I will. By God I will! We’ll not let that blighter win.’
Slowly, as he talked, Jess found her weary muscles relaxing. Oh, she was so tired – tired of bearing the burden all alone, tired of trying to make sense of it all.
‘I love thee, lass,’ he said against her temple.
Reuben… She was too full up to speak, but her heart cried his name as she let her arms creep round him, feeling his sturdy warmth begin to seep into her, loosening the frost that had held her soul in bondage for so long. The healing would take a long time, but she might, one day, feel worthy of the love of this man.
* * *
Rudd escorted Jess and Bella back to Park Lodge, where they were to pick up Bella’s belongings and transfer them back to the big house. Bella had enjoyed her stay at the cottage, being cosseted by Miss Peartree, mothered by Lily and with baby Jabez for company. By contrast the nursery must have seemed a dreary place, especially when it contained old fears and half-understood new griefs.
‘Never mind,’ Lily smiled. ‘You shall come to me every day for lessons and, who knows? In time I may be able to be with you. I – and Jabez too.’
‘Oh, my dear,’ Miss Peartree fretted. ‘You mustn’t promise such things. It wouldn’t do. It really wouldn’t.’
Lily turned her strange, bright eyes on the old lady. Of course she would be going back to the big house – she, and the baby: Richard had said so. ‘Why not, Cousin Oriana?’
Since all of them knew why not and none of them understood her smile, an awkward silence fell. Into it, Rudd said, ‘You might have to find a new nurserymaid, though, Miss Lily.’
‘Oh?’ Startled, Lily turned to Jess. ‘Why, where are you going?’
‘Not far,’ Rudd said.
‘Reuben!’ Jess’s protest was a breath. ‘I en’t yet said—’
‘No, but you will. The fact is, Miss Lily, Jess and I are going to be married before long. I won’t say she’s set the date, but she’s thinking about it.’
‘Well, that is good news!’ Miss Peartree cried, impulsively hugging Jess. ‘At last, some good news in all this—’ She stopped herself, remembering Bella.
The child was looking bewildered, her grey eyes searching one face and then another until Jess bent and hugged her. ‘That’s all right, Miss Bella, my darlin’. I ’on’t be desertin’ you yet a while. Come on, let’s go see how old Ching’s doin’. Mr Rudd’ll carry your things.’
‘You see?’ Rudd sighed, hazel eyes twinkling. ‘She’s already got me right where she wants me.’
Their news cheered the atmosphere at the cottage and was instrumental in urging Lily to act. Jess was happy: now Lily, too, needed to be sure of her future. For her, one final step remained before her happiness was complete: she had to see Richard again. Most of all she needed to hear him confirm that he shared her dream of their being together openly, in the face of all the world, man and wife before God and under the law. The strength of their love demanded it. Oh, there would be talk. There would probably be scandal. But others had weathered much worse.
‘I have contained my soul, though not in patience,’ she wrote with wry humour in her journal only a few days after Maud Fyncham was buried.
How much longer can I wait? I must see him, must hear it from his own dear lips, even if he chides me. He knows I cannot bear to be uncertain. Once I am reassured that he feels as I do, once I know that I shall one day be his wife, then I shall be content to wait, for as long as he wishes. Oh, Richard, my dearest love. Just to see you. To be held in your arms, however fleeting the moment…
She had no doubt as to when she would go: the calendar gave her the exact date – her chosen birthday, May the twenty-ninth, the day she would officially be twenty years old. Since Richard had not yet seen his son, she would take Jabez with her.
Having lain awake all the previous night, feverish with longing, tormented by doubts and uncertainties, she rose early and took her time over preparing. She donned her costume of turquoise and white – two years outmoded but the best she had; she dressed her son too in his best gown and bonnet, and wrapped him in a shawl, singing to him, kissing his little hands, watching him laugh. How she loved him! Indulging her sense of the dramatic, she placed him in the rush basket in which she herself had been left on the doorstep of the rectory. She had never known her real parents, but Jabez would know his. In time, the world would know.
‘I’m taking him for a walk in the woods,’ she explained to Miss Peartree. ‘It’s too rough for the perambulator. Oh… I feel so happy today, Cousin Oriana. The gypsy wasn’t wrong – she just didn’t tell me the bad things that had to happen bef
ore I finally found my real heart’s desire. Perhaps, even now, my real father will come and find me and then… oh, then, for sure everything will be well. Dear Cousin Oriana!’ She leaned to kiss the startled old cheek. ‘Bless you for standing by me. You won’t be sorry. I shall never forget how kind you’ve been.’ And she picked up the basket, making little tutting noises at the baby to make him smile before she set off, heading along the drive.
* * *
That lovely, smiling morning, Jess and Bella were enjoying the sunshine in the garden – Bella running after a hoop while Jess sat with a basket of mending until, with a thump and a cry, Bella fell headlong on the gravel path, taking the skin off one knee and sorely scratching her face. Jess hurried her back to the kitchen to tend the wounds; all the maids gathered round clucking and fussing and Mrs Roberts soothed the patient with a gingerbread man fresh from the oven. Eventually, Jess led the bandaged child back to the nursery and put her in bed to rest a while, with Ching for company.
She had hardly settled down with her mending, beside the window in the schoolroom, when a disturbance sounded in the passageway, someone stamping up the ‘family’ stairs, knocking into furniture and walls, sobbing… As Jess ran and flung the door open, Lily appeared, her turquoise bonnet half off, her hair disordered, her face red and her odd eyes wild with tears. She was carrying a basket which, to Jess’s surprise, contained the baby.
‘Miss Lily—’
‘Don’t ask!’ Lily cried, placing the basket on the table, bending to kiss a tiny hand with hurried anguish. ‘Oh, my little love… Take him for me, Jess. Keep him safe. And whatever you do, don’t let his father have him! Don’t ever, ever let Richard Fyncham have him!’
Then she was gone, gay skirts flying as she ran across the schoolroom to the far door, heading for the back stairs. Jess might have gone after her, but Bella was calling her, upset by the commotion; Jess hesitated, pulled three ways – Lily, the little girl, the baby… She picked up the basket and set it on the floor, for fear the baby might roll, then went in to Bella and assured her that everything was all right.
She was lying. Everything was very much wrong.
‘Don’t let his father have him…’ The words echoed again and again in her head. Was Jabez, then, Richard Fyncham’s child? Dear Lord…
* * *
Afterwards, Jess was to remember a time when Lily had said how easy it would be ‘just to walk out into the water and keep going. Let it take you up in its arms and sweep you into its depths. Where it’s all calm, and quiet. Where there’s no more noise and strife.’ The water had always fascinated her, called to her.
This time, she hadn’t risked failing in her purpose. This time, she had gone down to the sea, into the fast-flowing channels where the tide was swirling, where the undertow surged with a force that no human could resist. The mermaid princess had gone back to her own.
By a piece of irony, her body was found by a gypsy. The diddicoys had camped a few miles further down the coast that year and it was a few miles down the coast that Lily came to rest, washed up on the beach with her hair wreathed in seaweed. It was said in the villages that when the woman Bathsheba heard the news she wept and stormed and laid a bitter curse on Richard Fyncham’s head. Jess wondered at it when she heard.
She herself went about her duties in a state of shock. She’d always liked and respected the squire, but now she despised him. She wondered how she could have missed the signs. Had Lady Maud guessed? Was that why she had been so distraught those last few months? Was that why she had thrown herself off the roof?
She couldn’t stay on at the big house, not even for Bella’s sake. Sal Gooden took over in the nursery and Jess moved to Park Lodge with baby Jabez. Sir Richard made no objections.
Lily was laid to rest beside Matty, though there was some argument about it, her having taken her own life, but Sir Richard set his stall out and objectors were silenced. So she and Matty were united for ever, in death. It seemed wrong to Jess, but what else could be done?
Amid all the other trials that summer, police investigations into Matty’s death continued. Rudd had reported Jim Potts’s allegations about Ashton Haverleigh and the detectives came to interview Jess, to hear her version of the tale. But when later they approached Jim Potts he denied having spoken to Jess, denied being out that night, denied poaching… Ashton Haverleigh himself had, it seemed, gone abroad somewhat hastily, but he wrote sending evidence that ‘proved’ he had been elsewhere that evening. His involvement did seem a bit unlikely, anyway, as the police inspector remarked to Jess. After all, Mr Haverleigh was a gentleman. There’d been enough slander against his name with all the talk about him and Lily Clare. Jim Potts had probably used his name to muddy the waters. Most likely one of the poachers had shot Matty, but the inspector doubted they’d ever find out which man, or why, or how.
Another problem was the pistol that had been used. The bullet had come from a derringer – a small handgun, not common in England. Where had it come from? Who had been carrying it? No one knew.
Most probably, the policeman intimated, no one would ever know.
* * *
Sir Richard took his daughter away to the Continent. He appointed, and took with him on his travels, a new nurserymaid and a new, older governess who, coming from London, knew nothing of the scandals at Hewinghall. By the time they returned, Bella’s head was so full of new things that she had almost forgotten the traumas of the past.
That August, Jess and Rudd were married: it was convenient, and it suited them both, even if it was a little sooner than Jess had expected. She was rigid with fear the first night, but Rudd didn’t rush her, only lay holding her hand, talking to her. A night or two later she was able to let him hold her as they went to sleep, and by stages, sweetly and lovingly, he broke down her barriers. In after years Jess often thanked the good Lord for putting Reuben Rudd in her way; he was everything she could have wished for in a husband.
They took Jabez with them to the cottage in the wood. Sir Richard had intimated that he would be happy with this arrangement and would not interfere – in obeying Lily’s last wish he was also shrugging off any responsibility, in Jess’s opinion, but Jess was happy to have the baby. Officially he was her nephew, Matty’s son, but she loved him for himself.
One satisfaction was that in choosing Eliza Potts to join his band of ‘handmaidens’, Nathanael Merrywest met his match. Eliza was no naive girl to be terrorised by his threats, and with her formidable family behind her she exposed the preacher’s sins. Jess, too, spoke up. With her husband’s support and encouragement she was a vital witness in the case that sent Merrywest to prison for twenty years, the main charges being several cases of aggravated rape and sexual assault on children in his care. The church and the law demanded a heavy price of a man who would so misuse a position of trust. Even his timid wife took heart and divorced him, and in time remarried happily.
Standing in the dock, flanked by burly policemen, Merrywest was a diminished man, robbed of his glamour, his thunderous voice reduced to a surly mutter. Jess could find no pity for him – he deserved every day of his sentence – but she no longer wished him dead, so at least one sin was removed from her conscience.
Another day in court saw Jim Potts and one of his cousins sent to gaol for six months for poaching and assault, after a fracas when ‘Obi’ Joybell was knocked senseless by a bludgeon. He recovered, but after that Rudd became more disillusioned with his job – working all hours, against such odds, raising fine birds only to see them slaughtered; he and Jess decided to leave the bad memories of Hewinghall behind. In the summer of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, Rudd got his licence to deal in game and they moved, with three-year-old Jabez, to a fine house in the middle of Lynn. In time, Jess even had her own maid-of-all-work, and later a parlour maid too. Sometimes she had to pinch herself to be sure it was true.
She also, at last, swallowed her vanity and acquired a pair of spectacles, which made close work and reading suddenly so much easier,
and she joined the library, where she was astonished to discover what new horizons waited to be explored through the printed word. It had taken her a long time, but now she made up for the delay, delighting in educating herself. It made her, she felt, a better wife for Reuben.
Her one continuing sorrow was her failure to bear a child of her own. Reuben said it didn’t matter – he said she was enough for him and what with Jabez, and the Fysher brood always in and out, he didn’t want for youthful company. But Jess brooded on it for years. She was barren and for both her and Reuben, whatever he said to cheer her, that was a sadness.
Still, they had Jabez, whom they both loved like a son. He grew into a fine young man, with dark curly hair like Lily’s, and vivid blue eyes, and an easy charming way that was part Lily and part Richard Fyncham. His tall, rangy frame was all Fyncham. But his name was Henefer and as far as he knew Matty Henefer had been his father. No one in Lynn, other than Jess and Reuben, knew the truth.
Nor did it seem that Sir Richard Fyncham cared. Never in all that time did he enquire after his motherless natural son, though he continued to devote himself to spoiling his daughter.
News of Hewinghall came from Miss Peartree, with whom they kept in touch. The old lady remained at Park Lodge, with Dolly Upton to look after her even after Dolly married Bob Gooden, Rudd’s apprentice; he moved into the lodge, too, and continued keepering.
Miss Peartree wrote that Sir Richard was so anxious to protect Bella he had attempted to prevent her marrying, but when Bella turned twenty-one she defied him and became Mrs Gerald Stroud. But she was never strong. The following year, just as war broke out, she died giving birth to her son, Hammond Fyncham Stroud. Sir Richard was desolated.
When the Great War began, Jabez Henefer was twenty. He volunteered at once, much to the despair of his adoptive parents. Jess and Rudd spent three years in daily terror of hearing black news and finally it came, in December 1917: Jabez had been wounded and was gravely ill with septicaemia. The generals sent home a thin, sickly skeleton over whom Jess wept many tears, but Jabez was strong; he fought back to health and while he was on leave, he married his cousin, Fanny Fysher’s daughter Bessy. Then, in April 1918, newly promoted to Corporal, he went back to the front, proud and laughing, telling his family that he’d faced his fate and beaten it – the war wouldn’t get him.