She crossed the yard and went indoors. The fire had burnt low in the stove so she raked the ashes and put on more wood. She then went to the foot of the stairs.
‘Philip, are you there?’ she called.
The house was as silent as the grave. She climbed the stairs to the boy’s room and, finding it empty, descended again. When she hung up her jacket and beret, she noticed that Philip’s coat was gone; he must have come in while she was out and followed Charlie up to Slipfields; but at least he was wrapped up warm, she thought, for his balaclava helmet and scarf had also gone from their peg on the door.
Snow was falling steadily, piling up on the window-panes. The kitchen was dark and she lit the lamp. While she was replacing the glass, there came a loud knock at the door and when she went to open it, the postman stood there, wrapped in his cape. He put a letter into her hand. It had come by the second delivery.
‘I could see it was from your Robert,’ he said, ‘so I brought it out to you straight away.’
Linn was almost overcome. She had never expected such a thing.
‘Won’t you come in for a cup of tea?’
‘No, I’d sooner get back, thanks. I don’t much like the look of this snow.’ Waving to her, he turned away. ‘I hope it’s good news from your boy,’ he said.
Linn, at the table, close to the lamp, put on her spectacles and read her letter. It seemed to her that the writing was strange but soon, as she read, she understood why.
‘I’m writing this with my left hand and making a mess of it too,’ Robert wrote. ‘I am in hospital (cannot say where) with a broken right arm and two fractured ribs. Believe it or not I fell down some steps! (I’m expecting to get a medal for that!) One of my ribs punctured my lung so I shall be out of action for a while and it looks as though they’ll be sending me home for a spot of leave. I hope you’re proud of your soldier son! Expect me soon, in plaster, Rob.’
Linn put her face in her hands and wept. The news was too incredible. Robert, her son, was coming home. She thought of him in a hospital ward, hundreds and hundreds of miles away, in pain, perhaps, and more ill than he said. But what were a few poor broken bones so long as he was still alive and was coming back to England again? Even the punctured lung, she thought, was nothing if he was coming home to be nursed. He would be safe, at least for a while, and perhaps by the time he was fully recovered, the war might be over and victory won, at least in the desert, anyway.
She read his letter again and again. It made her laugh and cry at the same time. How long would it be before he came? The letter had no date on it. It could have been written weeks ago. He might already be on his way, travelling homewards, even now. She pictured him stepping off the train, stiff in his plaster, sheepish, amused, looking at her with his deep dark gaze. ‘I hope you’re proud of your soldier son!’
She was still laughing and crying when she heard Charlie out in the porch, stamping the snow from his boots on the mat. When he walked in she stood looking at him and he knew at once that she had had news.
‘Robert?’
‘Yes! He’s coming home!’
‘I can’t believe it ‒’
‘Yes, but it’s true!’
‘Have you had a telegram?’
‘No, a letter ‒’
‘Here, let me see!’
‘He’s broken his arm and two ribs,’ she said, watching as Charlie read the letter. ‘The poor boy’s in plaster. He fell down some steps. One of the ribs has punctured his lung ‒’
‘Laws! That sounds pretty bad!’ Charlie said.
‘Yes. Poor boy. It’s terrible!’
But her eyes, her smile, her tone of voice, all belied the words she spoke, and Charlie saw that to her it was not terrible at all ‒ it was the answer to her prayers.
‘Will he get over that all right?’
‘Yes, of course. We shall see that he does!’
‘I wonder when he’ll get to us.’
‘Oh, I wish I knew!’ she said. ‘The silly boy hasn’t put a date. It could be tomorrow. It could be today! His letter might have taken weeks so it could be any time at all!’
‘I can’t believe it!’ Charlie said. ‘To think of our Rob coming home to us! I can hardly believe it’s true!’
‘No more can’t I! But it is! It is!’
Linn’s face was radiant. She laughed through her tears. It was years since Charlie had seen her like this. She was the Linn of the old days, looking at him with joyous eyes, letting him share her happiness; letting him come close to her, in thought, in feeling, in sympathy. She put out her hands and he clasped them tight. They looked at each other, exchanging new warmth, drawn together in hopefulness by this astounding piece of news, that Robert was coming home to them.
‘Oh, Charlie, I do wish he’d come!’ Linn could scarcely contain herself. ‘I wish he’d come walking in at that door, now, this minute, and no delay!’
‘He won’t come like that, without warning, you know. He’d be sure to send us a telegram first.’
‘Yes, of course, how stupid of me!’ Laughing, she drew away her hands, putting them up to her warmly flushed face. ‘I shall have to be patient, shan’t I? But at least I can get things ready for him ‒’
‘It’s rare old weather he’s coming home to. It’s snowing again, did you see? We’re in for a blizzard by the look of it.’
‘Robert won’t mind the snow!’ she said. ‘He’ll be glad to see it, after all that sand!’
But the snow brought Philip into her mind and she looked at Charlie with a frown.
‘Hasn’t the boy been with you?’ she asked.
‘No, he was still upstairs when I went.’
‘Oh, yes, but he’s been out since then. I thought he must have gone after you.’
The thought of Philip darkened her mind, because Robert was coming home on leave and would see what the boy had done to his books. It was the one dark blot on the day, spoiling it and bringing distress. She began talking to Charlie about it, telling him everything that had happened, and how she had sent the boy out of the house.
‘I was so angry about the books! Such a mess he’s made of them! Robert’s books, that he loved so much, all scribbled over with rubbishy words and with silly drawings everywhere! They’re all quite ruined, every one.’
‘What did you say to him?’ Charlie asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know!’ She spread her hands. ‘You can imagine what I said.’ She paused for a moment, looking at him. ‘You must admit he’s a difficult boy. Spitting in your face like that, after you’ve been so good to him! And then the things he said to me!’
‘What things?’
‘He said he hoped Robert was dead. He said he hoped he’d been blown to bits.’
‘I don’t wonder you sent him out.’
‘He said he hated this house and the farm and everything here was horrible.’
‘Yes, well,’ Charlie said. ‘He didn’t mean it, I don’t suppose. You know what kids are. They say these things.’
‘Yes, I know. I tell myself that. And what with his being away from home … I know we must make allowances.’ Linn, with a sigh, turned away. She put Robert’s letter into its envelope and stood it on the mantelpiece. ‘Anyway, I sent him out. He went into the barn ‒ I saw from upstairs ‒but I don’t think he’s there now, unless he’s hiding somewhere.’
‘I’d better go and look for him.’
‘Yes, make him come in and be sensible. Tell him we’re having an early tea. He can make himself some toast at the fire. He always likes that. It’s his favourite thing.’
Charlie went out into the snow and Linn, bending over the range, drew the kettle on to the hob. Her feelings had undergone a change ‒ Robert’s letter had done that ‒ and now when her thoughts dwelt on Philip, the enormity of what he had done no longer took first place in her mind. He was only a child, after all, and the farm was a lonely place to him. Perhaps, as Charlie had once suggested, they should ask for another evacuee; if Philip had company of his
own age he might not be so difficult; she would have to give the matter some thought.
As she busied herself, laying the tea, she glanced repeatedly out of the window. Charlie was going all round the yard, looking into every shed, and distantly she heard his voice as he called the boy’s name again and again. The snow was falling more swiftly now, filling the sky and darkening it, and Philip, it seemed, was not to be found. Where could he be? she asked herself; and in her heart, for the first time, she felt a stab of anxiety.
The mid-afternoon passenger train from Chantersfield to Kitchinghampton was running over an hour late. It had been held up at Chantersfield because the fireman had failed to arrive and much precious time had been lost while a man had been found to take his place.
Now, having stopped at Baxtry and Froham, it was on the last lap of its journey and would run non-stop to Kitchinghampton. Here was the chance to make up lost time, and, the line being clear and the signals at go, the driver was letting his engine rip. The fireman had the stoke-hole open and was shovelling on more coal. Snow fell and melted on his back and sizzled against the boiler-breast. He slammed the door shut and stood erect, flinging his shovel into the bunker and wiping his hand across his face. The driver, with his hand on the regulator, watched the pointer on the speed-gauge as it crept steadily up the dial.
‘I reckon we’ll give them a treat today!’ He meant the passengers on the train. ‘Show them what we can do, eh?’ he said, and had to shout to make himself heard. ‘We’ll be in Kitchinghampton by half-past-three so they won’t have much to grumble about.’
The needle crept up and up on the dial until it read eighty-five miles-per-hour. The driver looked out at the thick flying snow.
‘Bloody weather!’ he exclaimed. ‘Looks as though it’s setting in.’ Withdrawing again, he wiped his face. ‘The forecast was right for once in a way. We’re in for a blizzard and no mistake!’
The fireman pounded his chest and coughed. He spat out a mouthful of coal-dust and phlegm.
‘Did you feel a bump?’ he said.
The driver pulled on the regulator, easing it out, fractionally. His eye was on the pressure-gauge.
‘A fall of snow on the line, I should think. There’ll be plenty of them along this stretch.’
‘Whereabouts are we, do you know?’
‘Just coming up to Scampton Halt.’
‘I don’t know this stretch of line, it’s new to me,’ the fireman said.
‘You haven’t missed much!’ the driver said.
The train went rattling through the Halt and Fred Mitchell, in his office, stood at his desk and watched it go past.
‘They’re fairly burning it up today, by God!’ he said to himself with a little grunt. ‘Seems their hands’ve slipped with the coal!’
Dimly, because of the muffling snow, he heard the blast of the train’s whistle as it ran into Glib Hill Tunnel.
Cast A Long Shadow by Mary E. Pearce
Now you have finished reading the Apple Tree Saga we are sure you will enjoy Cast a Long Shadow, a charming standalone novel by Mary E. Pearce. Keep reading for a preview of Chapter One and details of where to buy the book.
When Ellen Wainwright was married to Richard Lancy in July, 1873, the day was so hot that the church doors were left wide open, and towards the end of the ceremony, a stray dog ran in and stood howling in the central aisle.
The incident caused some amusement among the small congregation but the vicar, Mr. Eustead, was seriously displeased and waited, tight-lipped, while Dyson the verger drove the dog out. He then turned back to the bride and groom and angrily pronounced them man and wife.
‘It warnt hardly our fault the dog got in,’ Richard said to Ellen later, ‘but the way Mr. Eustead bellowed the blessing at us, you’d think it was.’
‘Never mind,’ Ellen said. ‘We are married, that’s the main thing. ‒ I thought he was going to leave it half done!’
Nothing could mar her contentment that day: neither the terrible sultry heat; nor the disturbance caused by the dog; nor the vicar’s burst of temper. She and Richard were now one. The day was theirs and nothing could spoil it.
The dog itself was something of a mystery. It had never been seen in Dingham before, nor was it ever seen again, and the only explanation was that it must have strayed off a barge passing through the lock on the river. The matter was talked of for some days. A few people thought it rather a joke. Others thought it a minor scandal and the vicar was censured for having allowed the church doors to remain open. But it was only a good deal later, when Ellen and Richard had been married five years and things were not quite the same between them, that people remembered the dog in church and spoke of it as some sort of omen.
‘The moment I saw it,’ Mrs. Dancox used to say, ‘I felt a shiver go down my spine, and I warnt the only one, I don’t suppose.’ And Mrs. Dyson always said: ‘A dog in church is bad enough but a dog at a wedding ‒ anything could happen after that! And nobody never did know how it got there, neither, did they?’
‘It came off a barge,’ Dyson said. ‘Nothing very strange in that.’
‘We don’t know for sure, though, do we?’
‘If you had such premonitions, woman, how come you never said so at the time?’
‘On the wedding day?’ Mrs. Dyson said. ‘And cast such a blight on everything? That’s not my way, Bob, and never was. Such a fine handsome couple they made that day! And everything seemingly set so fair! It warnt for me to cast a shadow. There’s some dark things we must keep to ourselves.’
Dyson gave a little grunt. He had never known his wife to keep anything to herself, dark or otherwise, in twenty-six years of marriage. He had only taken the post of verger to secure some measure of peace and quiet.
One good thing at least had come of the business of the dog in the church, for the Stavertons of Dinnis Hall, on hearing about it, had given a pair of wire-gauze doors, and now the church could be kept aired without the incursion of stray animals and nesting birds. The summers were hot in the mid 1870s.
Ellen was twenty when she married, and Richard was almost twenty-five. Their courtship had been a happy one, and as they were well-suited to each other, their marriage got off to a good start. Everyone in Dingham agreed that they deserved their good luck, for Ellen’s life hitherto, with a jealous-natured mother and invalid uncle, had brought little joy; and Richard, too, left alone at eighteen, with a half-ruined mill on his hands, and his father’s creditors at the door, had had a hard struggle to make his way.
Within a month of his father’s death, Richard had repaired the old machinery, re-dressed the millstones, and cleared the weeds out of the millstream. Soon the old mill was working again: noisily, perhaps, with many a screech that set Richard’s teeth on edge and sent him hurrying round with the oilcan; but working, certainly, and coming slowly to life again after two years of idleness. And when the first grinding of barley-meal came squeezing down the narrow chute, into the open sack below, a few Dingham folk were there to see it, ready to try it between their fingers and offer advice on its quality.
‘You’ll come to it, young fella,’ said George Danks, whose barley it was that was being ground. ‘It takes years to make a good miller ‒ ten or twelve at least, I’d say ‒ but you’ll come to it surely in the end.’
‘I shall come to it sooner than that!’ Richard said, rather sharply, and his listeners believed him.
True to his word, Richard was master of his trade by the time he was twenty, and Pex Mill had a good name. But the business itself, having been allowed to run down, was not won back again all at once: often there was only work enough for three days’ milling in the week; and Richard made money on the side by dealing in various second-hand goods. He travelled about with two donkeys, collecting anything he could find that lay rusting or rotting in farmyards or workshop sheds. Sometimes he paid a copper or two, but mostly he was ‘doing a favour’, clearing away unwanted rubbish.
‘It’s a funny thing!’ Michael Bullock
said once: ‘It’s a funny thing that if I buy a hen-coop offa you it’s a valuable article worth five shillun, but if you take a seed-drill offa me it’s only old junk needing clearing away!’
Richard was certainly sharp in his dealings, but most people admired him for that. He was a man who meant to get on and, the way he worked, he well deserved to.
‘You want a cage for your canary?’ people would say. ‘Or ‒ maybe a medal to stick on your chest? Go to Dick Lancy. He’ll have one for sure. And if he hasn’t, well, you can bet your life he’ll know where to find one!’
Although he dealt in all manner of things, there was never any rubbish left lying about the mill, to mar its tidiness and neatness. Everything Richard brought home was carefully mended and made good, given a coat of paint, perhaps, and placed in the shed behind the millhouse. No one was ever taken inside. If a man came asking for elm planking or an old barrel for a water-butt Richard would say: ‘I dunno ‒ I shall have to see.’ And in a day or two the required item would be delivered. But only Richard himself ever entered the shed.
When Ellen Wainwright came into his life, he worked all the harder. His father’s debts had been squared by then and he was beginning to pay his way. Gradually, he made improvements. The walls of the mill and the millhouse were repointed, the roofs were re-tiled, and the worm-eaten weatherboarding over the luccomb was replaced by new. The old mill was itself again and, reflected in the millpond, where the water now ran pure and clear, looked just as it did in the old picture, painted by Richard’s great-grandfather, that hung above the mantelpiece in the kitchen.
Downriver from the mill, the banks in summer were crowded with tansy and comfrey and flags and the tall spires of purple loosestrife, and it was among these bright flowers that he first saw Ellen Wainwright. She was sixteen then and had come to Dingham with her widowed mother to live with her uncle, a retired seaman, at Victory Cottage, in Water Lane. Old Captain Wainwright was almost a cripple. He suffered much pain and was dying of cancer. He cared little for this sister-in-law of his who had condescended to keep house for him, but he and Ellen became great friends. She was at the river that day looking for the nest of a coot, so that she could report to him on the progress of the young brood. Richard went down to speak to her.
Seedtime and Harvest (The Apple Tree Saga Book 5) Page 28