by Mary Mackie
One evening, on my way back for dinner, I walked up through the woods with a bag of books hanging from my shoulder. The day had grown cloudy and the light was deceptive – I kept flinching away from clawing branches only to find they were actually some distance away. Then I glimpsed a figure among the trees ahead. It looked like Tom. Whatever was he up to, skulking along from tree to tree as if he were stalking something? His attention was turned away from me, to a place where the woods thinned into a clearing. Was that another man walking there?
Before I could decide whether the second figure was real or illusion, Tom suddenly yelled aloud, leaping up and waving his arms, then went crashing through the undergrowth of brambles and bracken, hollering like a Red Indian. Wildlife fled ahead of him, birds rising, calling, a flurry of startled wings, pheasant, blackbirds, jays, all darting away from the uproar. There was a shot…
I stood still, appalled. Who was shooting in Denes Wood? Where? A hare came loping along the path towards me, saw me, and veered out of sight. Somewhere a dog was barking. I couldn’t see it, but I heard a distant shout that silenced it.
Tom had stopped too. He was poised, listening.
‘Tom!’ I called. ‘Tom, what’s happening?’
He didn’t answer. He was watching something I couldn’t see. Was that someone hurrying away, crashing through the wood? Catching up my skirts, I forded through browning bracken, the books banging on my back. ‘Tom…?’
When he turned towards me he was laughing, a wicked grin splitting his ingenuous face. ‘That stopped him. Did you see, Kate? He was after pheasant and I stopped him.’
‘Who? Who was it?’
‘That old man. Mad Jack, they call him. He comes up here poaching. I watch for him. I stop him when I can.’
‘Stop him? Liebe Zeite! You mustn’t take such risks, Tom. You might have been shot.’
‘No, not me.’ He shook his tousled blond head, eyes sparkling. ‘I creep quietly, and then I run fast. Like the wind. It’s all right, Kate. He never sees me coming.’
‘But if he doesn’t see you, he might accidentally…’ No, he wouldn’t understand. ‘Tom… promise me you won’t do this again.’
‘I’ve got to,’ he insisted. ‘I’m the guardian of the wood. Pater said so. I found that wounded fox and took it home. But it died and that made me sad. And Pater said, “No more shooting in my woods. I won’t have my boy upset.” So I have to make sure the animals don’t get hurt. That’s my job.’
It was hardly my place to interfere, but it worried me. Tom was a Rhys-Thomas, and if that crazy old farmer was out with a shotgun, in the twilight… It didn’t bear thinking about.
Eight
Uncle Frank promised to have a word with Tom about the dangers of leaping out on a man with a loaded gun, though he was angry, too, about Mad Jack’s poaching. ‘I shall have to get Wells to write another letter,’ he said. ‘The man can’t be allowed to go around indiscriminately letting off guns on other people’s property.’
‘Perhaps he thinks he has good reasons for feeling aggrieved.’
Frank frowned at me. ‘Think so? Dash it, Kate… What is this? Are you defending him?’
‘No, of course not! I’m trying to be fair – the way you usually are.’
‘I gave up being fair to Mad Jack a long time ago. He’s used up his right to be given the benefit of the doubt.’ Narrowed blue eyes perused me closely. ‘Who’ve you been talking to?’
I had forgotten that the other side of the story had been given to me by Philip. ‘No one! I just thought…’
‘Well, don’t think. That old madman’s dangerous. You stay away from him. In fact, steer clear of the farm altogether. Don’t go near that short cut. I’ll tell Tom the same. I don’t want either of you getting hurt.’
This decree irritated me: I didn’t see why I should be forbidden to go anywhere. That was partly why, on Saturday night after dinner, I found myself creeping out of the house like a thief. The other part of my reasoning had to do with Philip Farcroft.
During that week I had occasionally glimpsed the curly-haired young farmer going about his work on the land – I had been watching for him, feeling curious, intrigued and, for no reason, unsettled by him. He had hinted at an interest in me strong enough to distract him from his work, as his brother Michael had been distracted by Mother. And he had, after all, asked me to meet him that Saturday night. I assured myself I wasn’t interested in him personally – how could I be, with my heart dead? – but I caught myself thinking about him more often than was comfortable.
I hardly needed my trusty little refill torch: the sky was clear and the moon two-thirds full. Among the growth on either side, wildlife stirred amid thick black shadow. I wasn’t afraid. For me, the dark was always full of friendly spirits breathing and whispering around me.
Before I reached the edge of the wood I heard the harvest party and, as I went down the track, the noise grew louder – music from a piano, a fiddle and an accordion, voices raised in song, and shrieks of laughter, with rhythmic clapping as if to encourage a dancer. The shouts grew louder, a storm of applause and whistling, banging on tables…
The barns lay off to the side of the farm lane, closer to the main road than the house itself, a sprawl of buildings flanking yards where haystacks flung great shadows. From one particular barn, with a sway-backed thatch roof, lamplight shafted mistily out from high windows. Beyond a half-open door large enough to take a laden wagon, I saw men, women and children seated at a trestle table strewn with the debris of a feast.
As I paused in the shadow of a hedge, I saw other people in the yard, a young couple taking the opportunity to do a little sparking. The girl giggled softly, the sound all but swamped in another burst of table-banging and boot-stomping before a silence fell and voices called out for a song: ‘Come on, bor. Your turn. Get you up.’ A piano struck up a brief introductory phrase; then a male voice began to sing, ‘“The sun had set behind the hill, Across the dreary moor…”’ I recalled Philip saying he’d go batty if he had to sing that song again. Did that richly resonant baritone belong to him?
The courting couple moved away, heading behind the haystack as the whole company joined with gusto in the chorus: ‘“To be a farmer’s bo-o-o-o-oy…”’ Listening to the sound fill the barn, the words telling a romantic story, I remembered the look that had passed between Philip and me in the church, charged with lightning force, and I felt the hairs on my nape lift with awe and, perhaps, presentiment.
I wished I could be in the barn with him, joining in the age-old celebration of a harvest secured. Unseen presences, jostling now around me, had swung scythe and sickle, tossed sheaves, threshed grain, sung the same songs, danced to the same tunes… Strangely, my soul felt more at home here than ever it had at Denes Hill. Some old, old ties were reaching out to reclaim me.
And then two dogs came hurtling out of the darkness, breaking the mystic spell. Behind them, the huge door opened wider, and against the glow of light I saw the burly figure of Mad Jack, bellowing, ‘Come you back here, you blamed beggaring dogs! Come here, I say! Boss! Bess! Heel!’
I had ducked back behind the hedge, terrified the dogs might sense me hiding there. But they must have obeyed their master for I heard him talking to them in a growl whose words I couldn’t catch. When I looked again, he was heading for the house, with the dogs at heel, their shadows long in the moonlight.
‘“He left the lad the farm he had, and his daughter for a bride…”’ Philip sang.
He was among his own people. He probably didn’t even remember hinting that I should meet him. And why had I come? Because I wanted to see him again? Or from sheer perversity, because he was forbidden fruit? It would be wrong of me to lead him on when nothing could ever come of any relationship between us. Oh, I had been a fool, yet again.
As I hurried back up the hill, glad that no one had seen me, I told myself that I would forget about romantic entanglements and concentrate on the future. But only my intellect heard me. Th
e rest – heart, soul, blood, sinew and instinct – sang songs of ties that could never be unbound.
When next I wrote to Mother, I put in a line or two asking why she had never mentioned the Farcrofts. In reply, she said she hadn’t spoken of them because they weren’t important: they were not the sort of people she, or I, would wish to cultivate. But baby Hansi was teething, Rudger had fallen and cut his knee, and guess what Pieter had said…
* * *
Staying in King’s Lynn for a few days, as a guest of my uncle Harry and his wife, I found their genuine welcome a relief after the constant undercurrents of Denes Hill. One evening, much to my surprise and pleasure, they asked me to stand godmother to their son, my new cousin.
‘Well, you did bring the little chap into the world,’ Harry said.
‘Oh – yes.’ Too late now to deny it.
‘We’re going to ask the twins, too,’ Saffron added. ‘Emmet will make a gorgeous godfather, and it will please Tom to be included, even though he probably won’t understand. But three godparents is enough, we think.’
‘Ample,’ said Harry heartily. ‘Vicky can be godmother to the next one.’
Ah, so that was the cause of their defensiveness – Grandmother had thought her own daughter ought to be first choice. ‘I’m immensely flattered,’ I told them. ‘Have you finally decided what names you’re going to give him?’
Saffron’s smile went a little askew, but Harry’s thin face was bright with pride as he answered, ‘Yes, we have. Edward Henry John.’
John, not Philip. I flicked a glance at Saffron, who said hastily, ‘Harry was very close to his brother John.’
‘You were fond of him, too,’ Harry reminded her. ‘They were engaged once, Kate, did you know? Like Queen Mary and Prince Albert Victor.’
I enjoyed my stay at Hawthorn House. Saffron was still recovering from childbirth and confined to the house, but she belonged to a women’s suffrage group, some of whose members came calling on her; so I widened my acquaintance and enjoyed stimulating conversations. After her visitors had gone, Saffron made me laugh as she confided all their personal secrets. Harry, for his part, took me to the Chef Foods factory and introduced me to the staff in the offices, food preparation areas and the noisy room where canning machines operated. And then there was my godson-to-be, tiny Eddy; the nursemaid let me hold him, help her bath him, and take him for walks in his big perambulator. At other times, free to please myself, I was drawn by the delights of the town museum, the library, the historic buildings, the shops…
Inevitably, I found myself thinking of Carl-Heinz. I talked to Saffron about him and, to my relief, she was appalled that no one had had enough faith in me to question the lies he had told.
‘The trouble with Lady Vi,’ she told me over lunch, ‘is she doesn’t think any young woman is capable of staying on the straight and narrow. A girl wouldn’t need to do more than smile at a man for Lady Vi to scream “shame”, d’you know what I mean? I often wonder what she got up to herself, to have such a low opinion of other women. Though don’t tell Harry I said so.’ Sharing gossip with Saffron was a wicked delight. No one else dared speak of Grandmother so irreverently. ‘Clara was a beauty, so she was shipped off into the wilds of Cumberland. Next it was me in front of the spotlight, and I was labelled a fortune-hunter. And now there’s you – and poor Vicky, who may end up married to Oliver Wells out of sheer desperation. He’s just about the only man who ever gets near her.’
Poor Vicky, indeed. Not yet nineteen, she was being turned into a vinegary old maid.
Trying to bring the conversation round to Philip Farcroft, I asked if the same restrictions had applied to Mother when she and I came back to Denes Hill for those two years, after my father died.
‘Oh, it was different then,’ Saffron said. ‘She’d been married, after all. She had men crowding round like butterflies on buddleia.’
‘Was one of them Michael Farcroft?’
Saffron’s almond eyes widened in a face beginning to fine down now that she had had the baby. ‘Farcroft? What, the man who was killed a few years back? My dear girl… certainly not!’
‘I heard he was keen on her.’
‘Well he may have been. But Clara would never have associated with a man like that. They’re a strange bunch, that family.’
‘Even Philip?’ I asked pointedly.
Worried eyes met mine and she blushed crimson as she looked away. ‘I don’t even like to think about that. How could I have let him… He didn’t even wash his hands! Harry would be furious if he knew. I couldn’t ask him to call the baby Philip – it’s not a family name. You don’t think Philip Farcroft will hold it over me, do you?’
How little she knew of Philip. And how easily she had forgotten the extent of her need of help when he came along. ‘Of course he won’t!’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘I just know!’
‘What – sixth sense?’
‘No. No, I…’ It was my turn to feel uncomfortable. ‘I ran into him in the village. We agreed it was “least said soonest mended”, for everyone’s sake. You’re wrong about him, Aunt Saffron. I don’t know about his father, or his brother, but Philip is…’ I had no words to explain my opinion of Philip.
She surveyed me with narrowed eyes. ‘Philip Farcroft is a fine upstanding young man, and you, my dear, are on the rebound from a rotter. Been flattering you, has he? You should be careful, Kate. He’s a Farcroft. He might enjoy leading you astray, just to get back at the family.’
* * *
Early in October, Emmet returned to Cambridge and I began my life as a student in London, at the School of Economics in Clare Market, a gaunt maze of lecture halls, common rooms and crowded passages. I had never known a place like it. Wherever one went, earnest discussions on the Great Realities, or the latest political Cause, were in progress. I found it exhilarating.
My lodgings were in Lincoln Square, within walking distance of both the college and the British Museum. The tall house had once been a family home, but Mrs Armes now found herself alone, and so she took in ‘gentlewomen students’. Her taste ran to plants and draperies, the main rooms being laden with heavy curtains, hobbled pelmets and velvet table covers, several aspidistras and in the front room bay a monstrous prickly cactus which she referred to fondly as ‘Giorgio’.
My room was on the second floor at the back, a light and airy retreat with sprigged wallpaper and delicate Georgian furniture. The window looked out on back-to-back gardens festooned with laundry and haunted by cats, very different from Denes Hill, and from the von Wurthe house in the pine-clad lakeside resort of Wannsee in Berlin. I found the strangeness challenging, exhilarating and, I must admit, a little daunting, too. I was truly ‘on my own feet’, for the first time in my life.
I was also more alone than I had ever been, both physically and emotionally. Mother had written that of course she believed my innocence: that wicked Carl-Heinz! But we must not even think of my returning to Berlin. She and I would keep in close touch – of course we would, always! – but, she hinted between the lines, I was no longer to consider myself part of the von Wurthe family.
Some detached part of me pitied her. Trapped by circumstance, she had been forced to make difficult choices – Pa, the Menschen, and a secure family life; or standing up for me. The choice had been no choice. Poor Mother. Damned by her parents for some youthful indiscretion, married in desperation to an elderly man who left her widowed with a small child, coming back to the strict watch of her parents, escaping into a new life abroad with a wealthy husband… she was still a prisoner. But that, as I was soon being told by new friends, was the lot of women. That was why we demanded the right to vote, to secure a better life for ourselves.
My fellow lodgers at Lincoln Square both proved to be ardent feminists, though in different ways. Hermione Harmistead – ‘Miss H’ to all who knew her – was a devotee of the more militant wing of the suffrage movement, a stringy woman in her thirties, a research fellow and
occasional lecturer, who strode everywhere in a rush. When preoccupied she was brusque to the point of rudeness, and she carried about with her a strong odour of tobacco – she loved Turkish cigarettes, and belonged to some peculiar club in whose rooms she was wont to smoke a hookah, so it was said.
The other gentlewoman student, Winifred Leeming, with mouse-brown hair, mouse-brown eyes and a penchant for mouse-brown clothes, had, she said, been a bookworm since she was a child – which accounted for the extreme short sight which caused her to peer at the world through gold-rimmed spectacles perched on a retroussé nose. Brought up by a maiden aunt, Win had attended a strict convent school, and now was compiling a thesis which she anticipated would take her years to complete. To me that seemed a dreadful prospect, but to her it meant order for the foreseeable future. She too was a suffragette, but not of the active kind – the thought of window-breaking and fire-raising filled dear Win with horror. She preferred attending meetings, armed with facts and figures. She was always analysing and coming to wise conclusions – often hopelessly impractical conclusions since her experience of life had been so narrow.
But she did have one passion – a sailor cousin, an officer with the White Star cruise line, whose picture she kept with her at all times. ‘My cousin Stanton,’ she would say with a soft look to her mouse-brown eyes, taking out the picture and caressing it with thin fingers with long thin nails like claws. ‘Isn’t he handsome?’
As shown by the picture, her cousin looked boyish in his naval uniform; so I was somewhat disappointed to discover that the photo was several years old. In the interim, Stanton Leeming had put on weight and lost most of his hair. But he was still considerate, charming and attentive to plain little Win.
When Stanton heard that Win and I had planned to go and see Frank’s exhibition, he insisted on escorting us to the gallery. He talked to Frank while Win and I toured the gallery, I standing back to see the pictures while she peered closely at detail through her oval specs. I loved the energy my uncle portrayed in scenes full of vigorous activity, men at harvest, fishermen at sea, factory workers bathed in sweat and the glare of furnaces. Stanton admired the figure work, too, so he said.