‘What a lark!’ Claude said again, grabbing the jacket he’d flung across the back of a chair. ‘Wait for me, Johnnie!’
‘When is it to be?’ Billy said, standing up at last and following his friends.
‘I will tell you on the way,’ his brother said. ‘Come on!’
Before they went to the Saturday meeting Mr and Mrs Sowerby made one more effort to persuade their daughter to change her ways. It was beginning to worry Mrs Sowerby that the girl was so thin and looked so ill. Even though, of course, the unremitting diet of bread and water on which she had existed for the last eleven days had been entirely her own fault and could be altered the moment she saw sense and agreed to obedience. But she wouldn’t agree. That was the trouble. Some terrible evil had entered into her soul. There was no question of it. Mrs Sowerby had suspected it from the first. Now she and her husband could both see it quite clearly.
They had come to Harriet’s room on the morning after her punishment prepared to forgive her. They were both aware that she would have to be kept within doors until her bruises healed, since not all their neighbours saw the necessity of training up a child in the way it should go, and some had idle, vicious tongues, but they foresaw no difficulties that could not be overcome by a few days’ prayer and solitude.
‘You will obey us now, I know,’ Mrs Sowerby began, pleased because Harriet had risen as soon as they unlocked the door and now stood meekly beside her bed with her eyes lowered.
But the answer was an uncharacteristic question. ‘What have I to do, Mama?’
‘Why, promise me that you will not write to that dreadful man again, nor speak to him nor see him. That is all.’
Harriet lifted her bruised face and looked at her mother. One eye was closed by blackened, puffy flesh and her bottom lip was split by a scarlet fissure. But even before Mrs Sowerby could feel any pity for her she spoilt her chances.
‘No, Mama,’ she said, ‘I will not promise.’ Enough was enough. She would not allow them to bully her any further.
She quite took Mrs Sowerby’s breath away. After such a thorough whipping she expected abject obedience, not effrontery.
‘You will promise,’ Mr Sowerby said, angered by this foolish attempt at argument. ‘That is all there is to it. We have not brought you up to be disobedient.’
‘I will not promise,’ Harriet said thickly. Her mouth was painfully dry and she was finding it difficult to talk but there was no going back. This had to be said. She had made up her mind to it. ‘Mr Easter is a good man. I did no wrong in answering his letters, nor in speaking to him. I will not promise.’
‘Men are not good,’ Mrs Sowerby said. ‘Particularly men like him. Men like him ruin girls like you. Is that what you want, eh? Do you want to be ruined? Do you want to end up with some wretched bastard child? Do you want to bring disgrace upon us, eh? Is that what you want?’
‘No, Mama. But Mr Easter wouldn’t ruin anybody.’
‘He would! He would! Do as you are told.’
But the refusal was given again. ‘No, Mama, I will not.’
‘Have a care, child,’ Mr Sowerby warned, ‘that we do not beat you again.’
‘If you do,’ Harriet said flatly, ‘I shall die.’ She spoke so oddly, without any emotion at all, as if she were talking about someone else.
Mrs Sowerby felt quite chilled. What had got into the child? This was most unlike her. ‘Then be a good girl and give us your promise,’ she said, trying to cajole, and was annoyed that her own voice sounded false.
‘No, Mama,’ Harriet said again. ‘I will obey you in all other matters but I will not be unkind to Mr Easter.’
‘We will beat you,’ her mother warned.
But there was no response. No fear, no pleading, no emotion at all.
‘As you please, Mama,’ Harriet said. ‘’Tis all one to me.’
‘What is to be done with her?’ Mrs Sowerby said, turning to her husband in exasperation. ‘I begin to believe she is possessed.’
‘If that is how things stand,’ Mr Sowerby said, ‘then we must try what the bread of adversity and the waters of affliction will do. She is to receive nothing else, Mrs Sowerby, until she comes to her senses, which we must pray will be soon. ’Tis a sad, sad thing to see one’s child so stubborn, Harriet. You grieve me sorely. You grieve your mother sorely. Intransigence is a sign of the devil. Bread and water, Mrs Sowerby.’
‘A day or two should see her more amenable,’ he promised his wife when they were back in the kitchen and eating Yarmouth bloaters for their breakfast. ‘Let the smell of good food waft upon her and we shall see a difference, you mark my words.’
But the smell of good food didn’t appear to have any effect upon their daughter at all. Her answer was always the same. She would be obedient in all other particulars but she would not promise the very thing that was required of her. She was quiet and withdrawn, speaking only when she was spoken to and making no fuss or complaint, but they could not change her mind.
‘I have made a broth of chicken bones,’ her mother said on the seventh day. ‘Would you not care to taste some?’
But the answer was the same lethargic, ’No, Mama.’
‘I cannot understand it,’ Mrs Sowerby said to her husband at dinner that evening. ‘She must be hungry by now. She certainly looks it.’
But the gnawing pains in her stomach that made Harriet sit bent double like a jackknife, and the cramps that locked her feet in a vice and pulled the muscles of her calves into tangible knots, and the scars and bruises on her face and arms that were taking so long to heal were silently endured and never spoken of. As the days passed she grew weaker, it was sometimes hard for her to remember why she was locked up and what she was doing, but the sight of her mother’s insisting face renewed her opposition, morning after morning. Whatever she had to endure she could not give way. Not now.
‘No,’ she said that Saturday evening. ‘No Mama, I will not promise.’ Her wrists were so thin she could circle them easily between finger and thumb, and she was so cold it was all she could do to stop herself shivering. As soon as they are gone, she thought, I will wrap myself in the blanket and sit by the window. There was little enough to look at in the yard but it was better than staring at the wall.
It was growing dark when the rescue party escorted the pony-cart across Angel Square and into Churchgate Street, with a sizeable ladder clattering in the back of the cart among a collection of saws and hammers that Billy had considered indispensable to the adventure, Ebenezer had provided a lantern and a tinder box, and Claude had insisted upon bringing a jar of treacle and an old sheet, maintaining that the easiest way to break glass without fuss was to cover it with a sticky cloth before you hit it. Young Tom was swollen-chested with importance because he’d been assigned to drive the cart, and they were all in a high state of excitement.
At the corner of Churchgate Street they stopped the pony and sent Tom off to peer through the Sowerby’s window and see if the house was empty, which, as he soon came scampering back to tell them, it was. The laundry door was on the latch, as promised, there was a bundle of rather crumpled, exculpatory washing on the counter, and the back yard was empty.
They left Tom sitting in the street and gave him strict instructions that he was to watch the road and whistle a warning if he saw anyone coming downhill from the direction of the chapel. Then Billy took the hammers and the blanket and the sheet and the lantern and the tinder box, complaining that he’d only got two hands, and Claude bore the treacle before him like a sacrificial offering, explaining that it took a deal of caution to carry treacle damnit, and Eb and John struggled the ladder through into the yard.
It was dark out there between the houses for there was no light from any of the surrounding windows. The Sowerby house was black and deserted and Mrs Kirby had closed the shutters on her dining room above the laundry. John lit the lantern and hung it on a nail that was sticking out of the coal shed. Then he and Eb manoeuvred the ladder into position against the shed
and under the window, hissing instructions at one another in hoarse stage whispers.
He was so charged with excitement and nervous energy that he didn’t think to look up at the window until his foot was on the bottom rung of the ladder and he was starting to climb. And then what he saw made him catch his breath with pain and revelation. Such a little white face gazing at him mutely through the narrow pane, a little white ghostly face, hollow-eyed and disfigured by blue and green bruises, its thin cheeks lined with long eerie shadows from the flickering light of the lantern.
And in the single second, before he began to climb, a second without words or reasoning or even conscious thought, he knew that he loved her and that he would always love her, that he couldn’t bear her to be hurt, that he would do anything to protect her, that he wanted to stay with her for the rest of his life. ‘Hold up the lantern!’ he whispered to Billy. ‘Is that treacle spread?’ And he began to climb.
As he drew level with the window he saw that she was sitting on the floor wrapped in a blanket, and he signalled to her that she should move away from the glass and was pained to see how slowly she did it. But then he was too busy to look at her, as the sticky cloth was passed up to him and he spread it messily across the central pane and tapped it with Billy’s hammer. It broke with a subdued cracking sound, falling into the room, sticky sheet and all, and he pushed in the jagged edges that remained with the palm of his gloved hand and Billy climbed up the ladder after him and stood on the coal shed to hold up the lantern so that he could see what he was doing.
‘It is safe now,’ he whispered to her as the last chunk of glass fell. ‘You won’t cut yourself, I promise.’
She was sitting on the edge of a low truckle bed, crouching with the blanket pulled tightly about her like an Indian squaw.
‘What have I to do?’ she said dully.
‘Climb out of the window,’ he whispered. ‘You won’t fall. I will hold you.’
But she didn’t get up. ‘Where is the good in it?’ she said in the same dull tones. ‘They will not let me see you. I might as well stay here and die.’
‘You are seeing me now,’ he said, speaking more loudly with the urgent need to persuade her. They were wasting time. Her parents could be back at any moment. Oh, how could he get her to act? He could feel strength flowing through his veins, down his arms, into his hands. His fingers were tingling with it. He stood at the top of the ladder, wishing he could touch her and send it coursing into her veins too. ‘They cannot prevent us,’ he said. ‘It is beyond their power. Come out of here, my dear love. Just give me your hand. That is all you have to do.’
But she stayed where she was, looking at the floor.
‘What’s amiss?’ Billy hissed from below.
‘I can’t persuade her,’ John replied. ‘She don’t move. What is to be done?’
‘Weakness,’ Billy said, practically. ‘That’s what it is. Well if she can’t stand, Johnnoh, she must be carried, that’s all. Hold the ladder steady boys. That’s the ticket! Now Johnnie. In you go!’
Afterwards John couldn’t remember what he’d done or how he’d done it. He had a confused impression that he had caught his dear Harriet in his arms, horrified at how light she was, and that he’d half lifted, half dragged her to the window, and that Billy’s hands had reached out of the flickering darkness to guide her feet onto the rungs. He knew that she’d clung to his shoulders for a long time, whispering, ‘I can’t! I can’t!’ and that Claude had whispered up from the yard. ‘Hush! Is that the whistle?’ But how they finally managed to ease her down the ladder to the ground he couldn’t recall.
Once there it was a simple matter to pick her up in his arms and run. She was hardly any weight at all and in any case love and panic had given him quite amazing speed and strength. He bundled her into the cart as the others followed him out of the house, and Billy flung the hammer and the tinder box down beside her slippered feet, Claude hung the lantern on the cart, Eb jammed the ladder into the remaining space, young Tom scrambled aboard and took up the reins, and they were off, trotting downhill in the September dusk, smelling the smoke from the coal fires all about them, listening to the whinny of horses in Mr Kent’s stables, the droning of prayers from the distant chapel, running and running until they erupted into the lovely open space of Angel Square, and Billy threw his cap into the air, chortling, ‘Wheee! We’ve done it! Wheee!’
Bessie was waiting for them at the front door, with Rosie from the laundry standing beside her, with a black cloak over her arm and her odd round face as yellow as the moon in the light from their little lantern. And then there was another scramble as the cart was unloaded and Bessie handed up the cloak and Rosie trotted off to get a hot brick wrapped in a cloth which she put beside Harriet’s feet, and the pony snorted and scraped his hooves on the cobbles with impatience.
And then the door was shut and Billy and his friends were gone and John and Harriet were alone in the cart and heading east along the narrow tracks towards Beyton and Drinkstone and Rattlesden. By now it was quite dark and the moon had risen, a milk-white crescent in a sky scattered with hard-edged stars. They drove in silence between the tangled hedgerows as a little owl shrieked in the woods above them.
It puzzled John that she was so quiet. During the rush and excitement of the rescue there had been no time for anyone to say anything, but now, out here, in the rustling peace of this empty lane, ambling between hilly fields washed silver by the moon, surely, surely they should talk. Yet she sat beside him as still as a statue, saying nothing.
‘You are safe now, Miss Sowerby,’ he said, trying to encourage her.
But she was still silent, the hood of the cloak hiding her face.
‘We are going to Rattlesden,’ he said, trying again. ‘You will be safe there with Annie and Mr Hopkins and the children, will you not?’
‘Safe?’ she whispered. ‘Safe?’ She turned to face him then, and he saw to his astonishment that her eyes were blazing with a hard-edged frantic intensity about them, like an animal caught in a trap. ‘You will not send me back to them, will you, Mr Easter?’ she begged. ‘Oh promise me! Please promise me! I should die if you sent me back.’
‘You have my word,’ he said, answering passion with passion. ‘You shall never go back. I swear it!’
‘They will beat me if you send me back,’ she said wildly, ‘and oh, Mr Easter, I could not bear to be beaten again, indeed I couldn’t.’ Then she tried to regain control of herself and spoke more calmly. ‘Forgive me. I should not talk like this. I have eaten nothing but bread and water for such a long time, I scarcely know what I am saying.’
‘They starved you?’ he said, struggling to control the rage and pity that the news had aroused in him. ‘Why? Oh Harriet, my dear, why?’
‘Because I would not promise never to write to you or see you again,’ she said and now she spoke with pride, lifting her battered face and looking at him with calmer eyes. Now that she was sitting beside him again she knew beyond any doubt that he was a dear kind man, just as she’d remembered him, and that her mother was wrong; he would never ruin anybody, only rescue them. But these were thoughts that couldn’t be expressed. That would be improper. And she looked away from him, once more hiding her face and her emotions behind the black cloth of her hood, afraid that weakness would betray her into saying too much.
He, too, was far more moved than he appeared to be. He looked fixedly at the pony’s ears to prevent the tears starting into his eyes. To have suffered so and all on his account.
‘You shall never be beaten again,’ he promised huskily. It was too soon to tell her how much he loved her. Better to wait until she was recovered. She must be treated tenderly after such an ordeal, that was clear. But he wanted to speak. Oh, how he wanted to speak.
With their thoughts in turmoil, he concentrated on guiding the pony through the dark lanes and she remained hidden in her hood, and neither of them said another word until they reached the pair of wattle and daub cottages that stood at
the edge of Rattlesden village. They could hear the stream splashing beside the track and see the great dark shape of St Nicholas’s church rising above them on its hillock like the ark on Mount Ararat. And there was the dark, stooping figure of dear old James waiting at the lych gate with a lantern.
He called to them as John turned the pony’s head towards the rectory. ‘Welcome! Welcome! We have stayed dinner for you. Pray let me assist you, Harriet my dear.’
And then Annie came tripping out of the door and flung her arms about Harriet’s neck with such violent affection that they both burst into tears. Annie helped Harriet into the house, which gave John a chance to talk to his brother-in-law while they led the pony to the stables and removed the harness.
‘She will be safe here with us, you may depend on’t,’ James said, as they walked back towards the house, ‘for we are quite hidden away in this valley.’
And that was true enough, John thought, for the hills rose on either side of the village like protective walls and the rectory was hidden behind a holm gate and a screen of yews and hawthorns.
‘Howsomever,’ James said, smiling his slow, teasing smile as they reached the front door, ‘you do seem to be making a habit of delivering your Miss Sowerby to our door, if you will allow me to say so.’
‘Yes,’ John confessed. ‘I do.’ It was warm in the panelled hall and the light from the candles was quite bright after the darkness of the journey.
‘If this continues,’ James said, opening the door to his study, ‘I shall begin to wonder as to your intentions towards the lady. For’ – still teasing – ‘I am bound to say that stealing her away from her parents’ home could easily be misinterpreted.’
‘I mean to marry her,’ John said.
‘I’m uncommon pleased to hear it. Does she know of your plans?’
They could hear the two women coming downstairs. ‘No,’ John said hurriedly. ‘Not yet. Say nothing I beg you. I will speak when she is well, you have my word.’
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