by Lorna Gray
I walked beside him. He was a man who worked hard for his bread. His shirtsleeves were rolled back, showing tanned skin and roughened hands. His clothing befitted a man of work but still he made me feel decidedly shabby in that same old tired frock and a petticoat that still felt a little damp after a hasty washing last night because his style of speaking and moving only served to emphasise the impression I’d had before. The one that said that the simple routine of the life he led here was not remotely a mark of the man himself. Perhaps all farmhands were like this if one only bothered to look beyond the standard stereotype of a squire and his rustic cottagers. Or perhaps the experience of seeing the world through the eyes of a conscript had made him less fitted for the old life. It was hard to say.
It was hard to be truly sure about any view I had formed about this man. Just as he had been on that first evening in his parents’ cottage, he still wasn’t very readable, despite the easy way in which he was explaining his reason for meeting me. He rattled the bicycle over a rough ridge and told me, ‘The Captain’ – he pronounced it Cap’n – ‘took the first patrol late last night. He came down after the squire had gone to bed to see that you were safely locked in. He met me on his way back up and gave me the job of doing the second tour, which in part is why I’m here now.’
The information disconcerted me and made me grateful all at the same time because now I knew the presence that had stalked me from the garden last night had been safety. I hid it by saying, ‘And Mrs Abbey? When did you see her to get my torch?’
I managed to embarrass myself with my own question. I hadn’t meant it to but it seemed designed to observe that eight o’clock in the morning would be a highly unusual time for bachelors to be calling on solitary widows. He made it worse when he said without hesitation, ‘The Captain passed by her house last night and saw all was quiet, as it ought to be at that time of night. It was my job to repeat the exercise today, but I met her at the ford just now. She meant to return it to you herself but she was in a hurry so passed it to me.’
It had somehow the air of being too quick to impart too much information for the sake of avoiding saying something else.
Her name loomed between us all the way up the hill. It came to a head when he stopped at the last gate before the village. Behind him the farmyard was full of people and horses again and he needed to join them.
‘Mr Hannis,’ I began, and found that my mind was unpleasantly turning over the question of whether Mrs Abbey had addressed him with a syrupy whisper of Hannis just as she’d called the other man Langton. I forced my mind to behave itself and kept my eyes determinedly level. They strayed to his hands where they gripped the handlebars. There was a scuff on the metal beneath his fingers. There was a raw-looking nick on his thumb too.
I lifted my head and asked him, ‘My cousin’s fall from her bicycle was an accident, wasn’t it? I’m not set to learn that Phyllis was the first to have an encounter with someone prone to unfortunate fits of temper, am I?’
‘No, you’re not.’ It was said with a different kind of grit. It was a sharp reminder that the recent victim had been his stepfather. Beneath the thick mat of sun-touched hair, his eyes were a very mild blue or perhaps green. ‘It was an accident, right enough. Your poor cousin landed in a heap. I was driving by and I picked her up almost the very second after it happened. She’d come off at the turn by the watershed – that plain barn on the lane above the village and the Manor. You’ll find that this whole area is riddled with water houses and pump houses and the like. And make it Danny, would you, please? ‘Hannis’ makes me feel as though you’re about to start barking orders like my old sergeant.’
It was there again; that readiness to add detail for the sake of disguising something else. This time, though, I was able to recognise the slip. Suddenly, he’d made me smile. Secrets kept sneaking in, but this one happened to have been endorsed by the Captain in my presence. Danny had been driving by in the car he was forbidden from using …
He knew. I saw that jaw set defiantly. ‘Yes,’ he said. There was a trace of grudging humour there. ‘And I ran her down to the hospital in it, so don’t tell the squire. Pops hates driving that great hulking machine. He’d never dare admit it to the old man but he wishes the squire had sold the Lagonda and not his own car in the spring. It was a much neater vehicle, with a length of nose that could be measured before it hit a wall rather than afterwards. So now it has become my duty to stealthily take the Lagonda to the garage for its regular top-up of oil and fuel and so on. And that day I was very glad of it because there she was.’
His hands moved in their grip on the bicycle; that sort of bracing movement a person makes when they mean to get on with the next hard task but have one last thing to say first. He began by saying gravely, ‘Next time you go to the shop, you should take the footpath from your cottage through the woods along the lower edge of Mrs Croft’s farm. It’s shorter. I only brought you this way today because your cousin would kick me in the shins if she thought I’d neglected you and I’ve got to ask: You are all right, aren’t you? You’re not frightened of staying there on your own?’
The gravity of his question made me smile. ‘You’re checking up on me. You said you would do as much when you wrote that note on Phyllis’s letter about the eggs. Well, I’m fine as you can see and—’
He interrupted me with a grimace. My briskness only made it harder for him to break into saying what I realised now he’d meant to say all along. He repeated quite seriously, ‘I really have got to ask. He’s not dragging you into anything – anything he shouldn’t – is he?’
I blinked. ‘Of course he isn’t.’ It was rushed and slightly appalled. The man in question was obviously the Captain and I didn’t like to think too deeply about what Danny thought he was implying within the range of insinuations and warnings that had passed my way lately. And for whom he was asking them. I couldn’t help thinking of Mrs Abbey again. The issue grew even more clouded when I reached the village shop and miraculously got to speak to my cousin, because, apparently, while Danny Hannis had been distracting me with questions about the Captain and the details of the unpleasant duty of picking my cousin up from the surface of the lane, he had been neglecting to include the information that the accident had only come about at all because Phyllis had run into Mrs Abbey’s car.
It had been left empty in the shade beneath the watershed where people sometimes parked while they visited the church. Phyllis had struck it after spinning around a bend downhill on a bright summer’s day to find that the small blue Austin Seven had been indistinguishable from the leaf pattern on the road. Speaking to me now as I stood with my ear pressed to that battered old telephone in the village shop, Phyllis must have noticed the sudden cooling of my mood.
‘Emily,’ she said sharply down the length of the line. ‘I hope that tone in your voice doesn’t mean you’ve been listening to idle tittle-tattle about poor Mrs Abbey?’
‘Not at all.’ It was a hasty assurance. I hadn’t told her about any of my encounters with the woman. That was a topic to be broached later in person just as soon as I’d established whether she was being released today or if I was joining her there. ‘It’s just that Mr Hannis—’
‘Young Danny Hannis,’ remarked my cousin acerbically, ‘would do well to mind his own business and refrain from adding to the gossip about a woman who has a hard enough life as it is, what with her husband currently serving a sentence for fraud.’
‘Mr Abbey is in prison?’ My voice squeaked. It was then that I noticed the postmaster was near by and listening. With an effort, I moderated my tone. ‘Oh dear.’
I was frantically trying to recall whether Mrs Abbey had ever implied that she was a widow or if I had just presumed it. Only I couldn’t do it because at the same time I was noticing that my cousin was now the second woman of my acquaintance to be showing a tendency for giving a single man the prefix young.
Young Danny Hannis and young Master John. It was the gentle condescension given to
charming youths by older women who felt it essential to set themselves apart from eligible females so that they might enjoy a platonic friendship with a handsome bachelor without incurring the scrutiny of the ever-critical public. But Phyllis wasn’t old – she was thirty-one and had perhaps two years’ seniority over Danny – and given the fact her secret now seemed to include a powerful disagreement, I thought it pretty fair to judge that on her side at least the term disguised feelings that were anything but platonic.
How Danny felt I didn’t know and I also didn’t understand the nature of the hold Mrs Abbey might have over him, even while I knew she had never called him young. But if there were something between them and this phrase really did form an unwitting betrayal of secret intimacy, it seemed extraordinary that when Mrs Abbey used it, she should be risking the inconvenience of exposure by repeatedly mentioning the name now; when it was only her own manner of speaking that was leading me to suspect an affair at all. And, what’s more, she was doing it when the former lover – either would-be or actual – was dead and she was not a widow herself but still married and she had the responsibility of three young children to bring up. And absolutely nothing to gain because young Master John, at least, was in no position to do anything for her.
And yet, that being said, I had already experienced the sense of sanctuary that Mrs Abbey found in speaking of John Langton’s infamy. His name was her idea of safety while Danny lived unmentioned. It was hard to think. Phyllis was trying to fix me upon a plan of rescue from her hospital and I was blindly agreeing without really knowing what I was saying, because all the while my eyes were fixed upon the door of the shop where it had just been opened by Mrs Abbey’s children.
The black Ford Y had drawn up alongside them and my heart was beating. The only time Mrs Abbey had risked letting me see that she didn’t feel very safe at all was the moment she’d made me swear to watch over them; and now the driver of that car was trying to coax the three boys into the back seat.
I crashed out of the shop just as the boys were all bustling around to the far side of the car to climb in. The only satisfaction I took from meeting the black Ford again was the sight of the fresh scrape down its left wing, from where its driver had swerved into a bush to avoid the Lagonda.
My voice was shrill. ‘Now boys, where are you going without your mother?’
I made them spin guiltily. This in itself was proof that I was right to act because they knew they were doing wrong. Two dark heads and one fair shuffled in the space of the open passenger door. Like the Lagonda, these doors were also hinged at the rear. Beside me, the driver smirked through his open window. ‘Another time, then, boys. Looks as though this young lady has the measure of you.’
He leaned away to tug the passenger door shut. I watched him reach. He was surprisingly close to my original description; in his fifties with a thin crown and a neck that rose from his collar without bothering to define his jaw. His suit had changed; blue trousers with a cream jacket that would have made him resemble the man who had attacked Mr Winstone, except for the fact that one of the few things I could remember about that man with any certainty was that he had enjoyed a full head of hair.
I stared in through the car’s open window, fiercely, I thought, although I was pretty sure its driver didn’t agree. I found I was feeling fervently grateful that the occupants of the shop were within shouting distance – in fact they were probably peering at us through the glass between stacks of canned goods – and that this man knew it.
I said with as much severity as I could manage, ‘I should like to know what you think you’re doing, Mr …?’
He didn’t reply. His eyes were following the boys as they kicked pebbles around the front of his car and Ben, the youngest, foolishly drifted within reach and I put out a hand and snatched him away from the car’s path. That made the driver smirk again. Then he completely disregarded what I had said and, with weak eyes fixed firmly on my face, continued seamlessly from where he had left off. He said in a peculiarly ponderous voice, ‘Just as I’ve got the measure of you, haven’t I, Miss Sutton? You were easy to follow this morning and you’ll be easy to follow again.’
It struck me that he knew my name, just as he had meant it to. It also struck me that I had been his quarry here until the boys had sauntered into the doorway of the shop and given him room to exchange the scope of his plans for a quiet chat with them instead.
While my mind was busily tripping into impossible calculations about what exactly he had expected to learn from either of us, he added a final airy instruction that left me gaping. ‘I’d like you to tell that to your new boyfriend. You do work fast, don’t you, you London girls?’
This wasn’t a threat for me. It was designed to mock me. And presumably involve the Captain. I was left staring in the dust of his wake as he released the handbrake and veered away downhill and around the bend, out of sight.
It took the smallest child to draw me out of my stupor by saying sternly, ‘You’re hurting me.’
I wasn’t. It was the typical exaggeration of youth. I just had a hand on his collar so that he hadn’t a hope of wriggling away into fresh trouble before I’d given him a piece of my mind. I bent down to his height and took him firmly by the shoulders. Blue eyes widened to perfect rounds as I begged, ‘What were you doing getting into a stranger’s car? Never do it again, Ben. It’s—’
Fright had made my voice rise. It was brought sharply back down to a sensible level by the eldest boy interrupting to say, ‘He’s not a stranger.’
I turned my head. After a moment I focused my mind upon the boy’s face. Brown hair, brown eyes and a mixture of tan and dirt on his skin. ‘You’re sure?’
‘He’s Daddy’s friend. He found our address in the book.’ It obviously didn’t occur to the child to question which book. I didn’t need to ask anyway. I thought it fair to guess that this was the information the man had sought to discover in the Manor ledgers.
I straightened. The middle boy added a sullen mumble with his head turned to his toes, as if he hoped he wouldn’t be heard but felt he ought to take this chance of one-upmanship over his brothers. ‘He’s Mr Duckett. He came to see us yesterday and we asked for a run in his car just now. And,’ he added with a glare for his older brother, ‘we’re not supposed to talk about Daddy.’
‘Where is your mother?’ It forced itself out of me through gritted teeth. The relief that the man had perhaps only been indulging their whim didn’t do much, since it still left me as his real target.
‘In there.’ The oldest boy jerked his head towards the door that stood slightly uphill from the shop. There was a brass plate on the wall signifying that this was the doctor’s house and it was a very effective defeat since I could hardly pursue their mother in there. It worked as blackmail too. I certainly wasn’t going to leave them neglected while I pedalled home, so I took them into the shop, instructed the shopkeeper to tell Mrs Abbey about the car and handed over the sweet ration from my book as a bribe to the children to stay under guard.
I was stopped in the midst of my rush out of the door by an elderly lady customer who had apparently been eavesdropping more strenuously than the rest. There was a waft of mothballs and lavender from her as she intercepted my course and an excess of pursed lips as she mustered the nerve to whisper, ‘Good for you. Mrs Abbey just waltzed in there without so much as a thought as to who had the first appointment or who would mind the boys while she was busy. Just because some fool of a man blacked her eye. And it’s not even as though she can pass it off as a husband with a heavy hand either, given where he is. How that woman got Captain Langton to—’
I didn’t hear what Captain Langton had done for Mrs Abbey. The elderly customer was distracted by the shopkeeper hurrying out with a parcel of goods for the Manor and a blithe confidence that I already knew I was meant to act as their delivery person. My neighbour thought it a glorious discovery and enough to supplant whatever news she had to impart about Mrs Abbey. In a blind haze I claimed my bi
cycle and braced for the stiff climb to the junction and then I was free and tackling the race along the two miles of lane towards home with only an anxious check every ten yards or so of the empty tarmacadam both behind and before in case Duckett should be a man of his word and be following me still.
There was no sign, however, of the man or the car; nor room for the dread that even if it really were me he was following, he still shouldn’t be let near those children; nor even of my worries about secret affairs or the realisation that the hurry that had prevented a woman from returning her borrowed torch in person had been the haste to get ahead of the old ladies in the queue to visit the doctor. My mind was filled to the point of overflowing with the way her youngest child had looked at me today. It was merging it with the embrace his mother had given him yesterday just a short while after making a show of spreading slander about a dead man’s name. As I neared the village, I caught myself trying to work through the revolting process of hazarding a guess at the age at which a blue-eyed child’s fair hair might be expected to begin to turn dark like John Langton’s.
Chapter 14
There was a path just beyond the turn of the lane at the watershed that led down onto the cobbled yard between the house and the tithe barn. I’d intended originally to knock on the kitchen door and go in with the groceries and take the chance to tell the Captain about meeting Duckett. But Mrs Abbey skulked like a ghost through everything and it was impossible to shake her off.
To give myself a little more time to collect myself and perhaps to catch my breath after the race along lanes, I left my bicycle propped against the warm stones of the old barn and walked down towards the wider space where the second barn housed the farm machinery and the car. The Lagonda was there, gleaming in the hard rectangle of shade within the wide barn mouth, looking like it was eagerly awaiting its next outing. The space behind where the tractor passed its nights was empty, but the hulking mass of the traction engine lurked forlorn where it had been abandoned under shrouds a long time ago.