Sandringham Rose

by Mary Mackie

  ‘She was sixteen year old,’ she said bitterly. ‘Sixteen, Miss Rose! How could he do that, get a young mawther in trouble and then deny it, go off and forget it? It wun’t her fault, but she was the one as suffered.’

  Meg’s sin had been far less than mine – she hadn’t had my advantages of education and birth. ‘I’m so sorry. This is terrible news. But sadly it’s the woman who always suffers in such cases.’

  ‘Aye, that’s so, Lord help us. But Meg wun’t the only girl as had cause to regret ever meetin’ Mr Hal Wyatt. I could tell you stories as would make your hair curl. And our Davy was hurt, too. He was fond of Meg. Where’ll he ever find a wife, lookin’ like he do? Oh, forgive me, Miss Rose, I didn’t mean to sound off so. I just thought as you ought to know the truth of it. You’ll be far better off with that Mr Turnbull, or even that Mr Basil Pooley.’

  In some ways I was thankful for the misconceptions about my relationship with Hal Wyatt: most people seemed to believe I had been sent away to prevent any entanglement with him, and that I had been allowed to come home because he was safely married and in America. It served as a screen to cover the more shameful truth.

  As I left the cottage, I ran into Ben Chilvers, covered in sawdust and chippings from the sawpit where he had been working. He greeted me with pleasure and swept off his hat, then stood brushing himself down as if embarrassed to be caught in such a state.

  ‘Your son and heir is beautiful,’ I said. ‘The girls, too. Little Alice is a joy. You must be very proud.’

  ‘Proud. And thankful,’ he said with a smile. ‘That’s so, Miss Rose. I’ve been blessed, though only the Lord know why. I never did nothin’ to deserve it, that I remember.’

  ‘Didn’t you? You saved my life once. I might have been trampled to death in the stable.’

  ‘Oh…’ Hot colour rushed up to stain his ears.

  ‘And don’t deny it,’ I broke in. ‘I shan’t forget it. Ever.’

  ‘That wasn’t nuthin’ I’m proud of,’ he said, shuffling his feet and looking at his boots. ‘I should’ve stopped ’im, but I was wholly scared o’ the great bully. And then tryin’ to cover up for ’im…’ He let his eyes meet mine again. ‘Truth is, Miss Rose, Amos witched them hosses.’

  ‘Witched them?’

  ‘That’s what he call it – witchin’, puttin’ a spell on ’em. He knows all the owd magic. Got a book full of receipts that he never lets nobody see. Healin’, drawin’, jadin’… He wanted to mek mischief and get back at Mr ’amilton. So he took a dead mole and he rubbed it on the stable doors, all up and down the jambs, and on the lintel. Hosses won’t go nowhere near the scent of a dead mole. It frights ’em. So when he let ’em loose in the stable, they got scareder and scareder, frit to escape through the doors, frit to stay with that scent in their nostrils.’ He paused and shook his head at me. ‘You don’t look as if yer believe me, Miss Rose, but that’s the truth. That’s why I had to wash that scent off, afore anybody found out. I was scared what ’ud happen. And I was shamed – shamed of my own father. You could have been killed, but he wun’t have cared.’

  Shaken by the fierceness in him, I said, ‘Nevertheless, Ben, you saved me, and I shall never forget it. I’m only sorry someone wasn’t there to help your sister Meg. Your wife just told me.’

  His brown eyes clouded with sadness. ‘She was a foolish girl, but she didn’t deserve that fate.’

  ‘No one deserves such a fate!’ I replied. ‘Oh, Ben, I had no idea. What can I say?’

  He shrugged his broad shoulders and looked down at the hat he held in his hands. ‘Nothin’ anybody can say, Miss Rose. Just that Mr Hal Wyatt better stay in America, that’s all, for if he show his face in Dersen’am agen…’

  For a moment the breeze blew extra cold. Was he threatening violence – he, the gentlest of men?

  He must have read my thoughts, as he so often did. He said in an undertone, ‘Davy Timms have a long memory, Miss Rose. A long memory and a bitter grievance against the world.’

  * * *

  As most of the district had observed, William Turnbull had become a regular visitor at Orchards on Sundays, arriving in time to join us at church, have lunch and spend the afternoon before catching the train back to Thetford. We often walked the fields with Father, or if the weather was bad we strolled, accompanied by Grace, in the roofed arcade between the bullock pens, where it was warmer, or took tea with Mama and played cards. The engineer sometimes called during the week, too, when he was about the district negotiating sales of his engines. In his own quiet, self-effacing way, he was paying me court. I did nothing to dissuade him. Nor, I think, did I actively encourage him.

  Basil Pooley also took to calling on Sundays, a fact which irritated me and amused Grace; she loved to watch the two men covertly squaring up like stags at the rutting season.

  ‘You should be flattered,’ she told me. ‘I certainly should be, if two men came dangling after me, all but coming to blows over my favours. I just wish you would make up your mind which one you’ll have. Mama won’t let me have followers until you’re settled.’

  ‘Then you may have to wait a very long while,’ I said.

  * * *

  During haying, I tethered Dandy to a post and climbed a field gate to sit and watch the scythes sweep and the tossers lift the grass to air and dry it. It was a bright day of chasing cloud and blue skies, birds calling, hares bobbing, the air full of the sweet scent of cut hay. As I breathed in the day, rejoicing in its splendours, the sound of horses and wheels drew my attention along the lane. A carriage was coming from Ambleford village. I recognised the uniform of the coachman and the footman on the box: Devlin retainers.

  The carriage was open to the sun, gay parasols lifted to shade the faces of two ladies who sat together. One of them was Lady Ophelia Devlin, erect and haughty; she had been a great beauty in her youth and even now, turned sixty, remained a handsome woman. Her aristocratic nose lifted as she met my gaze and looked through me with no sign of recognition beyond a flicker of disdain.

  The young woman beside her had her head turned to look at something beyond the far hedge, her arm extended as she pointed to draw the attention of her companions. All I glimpsed was a slender figure clad in brown silk, the turn of a youthful cheek behind a veil, and hair swept into a netted chignon beneath the straw and feathers of a fashionable pork-pie hat.

  The carriage wheels tossed up stones and a whirl of dust, making Dandy shake his head and stamp, so that I reached to soothe him. And then, as the vehicle swept by, I saw the man who accompanied the ladies – it was Geoffrey. He was smiling at whatever the young woman in the feathered bonnet was saying. I froze with my hand on Dandy’s coarse mane, seeing Geoffrey glance towards me, his smile dying as his eyes met mine and held across widening distance.

  Even after the turn of the lane took them out of sight I sat there, my stomach churning, my heart beating so fast I thought I must faint. I knew who that young woman must be. All at once I was conscious of my crumpled, serviceable clothing, my straw hat tied on by a length of old muslin, and of my inelegant perch on the gate. No wonder Lady Ophelia had looked through me as if I were a peasant. I must have been mad ever to believe that her son cared for me.

  Untying Dandy, I threw myself into the saddle and urged him into a trot and then a gallop, riding wildly down the lane, into the woods, with sunlight glimmering through trees. I drove the horse across the heath where rabbits darted back into their burrows in alarm and pheasants rose in a whirr of wings. Down the long incline among young pine trees we raced, and out to the watery wastes of the marshes, where bullocks grazed on lush grass threaded with dykes and bounded by banks. There, with the wide blue skies above me, with gulls flashing white wings, I half fell from the saddle and threw myself down among tall grasses to weep out the desolation that had been building in me for months.

  How long I lay there in the tall marsh grasses I do not know, only that it was long enough for the racking sobs to give way to deep, shuddering breath
s, and for misery to ease to numb despair.

  Half dozing, I heard the grasses brush. ‘Miss Rose?’ the voice came from regions over my head. Then a hand fell on my shoulder and, as I jerked round, away from him, I blinked up into a face made indistinct by the brightness of the sky behind him.

  ‘You all right, Miss Rose?’ I knew the voice, and as he moved his head so that he shaded me from the sun I saw him gazing down at me in concern – Basil Pooley, roughly dressed in corduroys with a linen shirt and jerkin, a yellow kerchief tied at his neck.

  I sat up, wiping with my hands at my futile tears until he reached into a pocket and presented me with a large handkerchief that smelled faintly of fish. I used it to dry my face, while he crouched beside me.

  ‘You’re a long way from home,’ he said. ‘Come out to see after the bullocks, have you?’

  Since I could not be truthful, I grasped at the explanation he offered. ‘That was my intention. And then I fell to thinking… about Victor, and…’ It wasn’t entirely a lie: Victor had been in my thoughts, his loss one of my greatest sorrows.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I do know how it is, Miss Rose.’

  Angrily, I blew my nose, dried my eyes and stroked the dishevelled hair from my face. ‘I didn’t expect anybody to come by. Not here.’

  ‘I’ve been fishing.’ He lifted a pole that lay close by, showing me the five or six dabs that hung there. ‘I was on my way back to share them with Old Fenny when I saw Dandy standing here.’ In answer to the question on my face, he added, ‘Old Fenny Jakes, the cockler. You must’ve heard of him. He lives in a cottage in the wood there.’ He gestured at the trees clustered by the horizon, where the land began to lift towards the ridge, perhaps half a mile away across the flatness of the marshes. ‘Why don’t you walk with me? The old man doesn’t get much company. We could beg a cup of tea. You look as if you need it. And Dandy here’ll be glad of the rest.’

  I let him help me up and then, like one in a dream, I walked beside him, lifting my skirts clear of the long damp grasses. Basil held his fishing pole jauntily over one shoulder, his free hand leading Dandy by the rein. I forget what we talked about. I only remember feeling empty, incapable of making any decision for myself.

  We climbed up to the lane that wound around the edge of the marsh. It followed the contours of the wood, flanked by broad, deep ditches full of water after a rainy spring. Where the lane took a sharp turn, the pungent scent of wild garlic assailed us. Onion Corner: now I remembered hearing of an old cockler who lived in the wood here – in a cottage owned by Basil Pooley.

  A pheasant called harshly from the thickets as we made our way down a rutted track where trees met overhead. Beneath them, ferns and blackberries tangled, half choking the course of a narrow ditch that drained on to the marshes.

  The cottage lay deep in the woods, behind a broken fence and overgrown garden. A dog came barking out, its noise sending pigeons clattering among the trees until Basil spoke to it sharply and it subsided, sidling round us as we trod the uneven path. Honeysuckle clustered over the door, trailing fronds around the window on whose sill stood jars half full of water and dead wasps, and either side of the path a litter of old traps and creels lay discarded among trails of tattered fishing net and rusting buckets. Two cats lay sunning themselves against a wall where straggling foxgloves bloomed.

  However, despite the surface air of neglect, a ladder was propped against the wall, and up on the roof a man was laying fresh thatch of Norfolk reed. Basil was evidently a thoughtful landlord.

  ‘Can’t leave the old man with rain dripping in, can I?’ he said, and greeted the thatcher, ‘Going well, Tam?’

  ‘Goin’ bootiful, Mr Pooley, sir,’ the man replied. ‘I’ll have it done afore you know it.’

  The cottage door stood ajar. Basil pushed it further open and stepped back to let me go first. ‘After you, Miss Rose.’

  Inside the cottage, as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw an old man seated in an armchair by the hearth. Despite the warmth of the day he was well wrapped, red flannel pinned around his chest, his hands encased in ancient fingerless mittens, a blanket of knitted squares about his knees and on his head a shapeless cap from whose edges protruded wisps of thin white hair. A fire burned low, barely a red glow through a mound of ashes, with a kettle on a hook above it; objects lay about haphazardly, and several more cats slunk soundlessly, twining round chair legs and under the hang of oilcloth on the table. The place smelled of cats, and of unwashed human being, but on a wooden drainer by the stone sink a pile of cups and plates stood drying, so someone had made a small effort at housekeeping.

  ‘Well now, Fenny,’ Basil said loudly, tapping the old man on the shoulder. ‘I’ve brought a young lady to see you.’

  ‘Oh, aye?’ the old man’s voice was high and cracked. ‘Who might that be, then?’

  ‘It’s Miss Rose Hamilton. I’ve told you about her. Miss Hamilton from Orchards Farm.’

  ‘Oh, aye?’ Old Fenny cocked his head, as if listening, and only then, as faded eyes stared into the distance, did I realise that he was blind. ‘Your lady-love, is she, bor?’

  Basil glanced at me sidelong, embarrassed. ‘Take no notice of him, Miss Rose, he talk like a fool at times.’ At this, the old man threw back his head, opening toothless gums to let out a cackle of laughter.

  ‘You sit and talk to him while I make some tea,’ Basil suggested.

  And so I sat on the edge of a sagging horsehair couch, the cats prowling round me, and attempted to make conversation with the gnarled, wizened old man who had spent his life hunting for cockles on the shores of the Wash – and smuggling when the opportunity arose, so gossip had it. He refused to talk seriously, but kept making obscure, teasing remarks and then laughing loudly at his own nonsense. Behind my back, Basil made a sign that said the old man’s mind was wandering.

  Covertly, I watched as he made himself at home, raking over the fire until it glowed hotly, then lowering the kettle to heat. The cupboard on the wall, with its ill-fitting door, was well-stocked with dry goods, as I saw when Basil opened it to get out a tea caddy. From remarks passed between them I gathered that he had been at the cottage earlier, and that it was he who had washed the dishes and made some effort to tidy the place. He evidently came there frequently, presumably to check on the old man’s welfare; I had a feeling that he was responsible for the good supply of food and fuel.

  ‘You need some new cups, Fenny,’ he told the old man as he poured the tea. ‘These are all cracked or chipped. Here you are, Miss Rose. This one’s the best – if you drink out of that side you’ll be all right. I’m sorry that’s not best china, but the tea’s a good blend.’

  ‘So long as it’s wet and warm,’ I said, taking the cup.

  I was touched by his solicitude, both for me and the old man. I had never thought of Basil as the caring sort.

  After a while, the tea drunk and the afternoon waning, I took my leave of Old Fenny.

  ‘I’ll see you to the gate,’ Basil offered, adding to the old man, ‘I’ll be a couple of shakes and then I’ll fry those dabs for our tea.’

  Outside the June afternoon was golden, the scent of garlic heavy on the warm air. The thatcher had moved his ladder and could be heard hammering pegs in on the far side of the roof while, by the gate, Dandy pricked his ears, seeming rested and eager to go.

  ‘D’you feel better now, Miss Rose?’ Basil asked.

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ Grateful to him, I looked into vivid blue eyes that searched my face with concern. ‘I’m only sorry I’ve inconvenienced you.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve not,’ he said at once. ‘You could never be an inconvenience to me. Miss Rose…’ He hesitated, his expression unhappy in the moment before he blurted out, ‘Miss Rose, it’s probably not the right time to ask, but you may as well know… Old Fenny wasn’t so far wrong. What he said about you bein’… I mean, you must know how I feel about you, and I just wondered if you could ever…’ The sentence trailed off as he read my face and
looked away, unlooping Dandy’s reins from the fence, his mouth compressing in self-disgust. ‘No. I see you couldn’t. Didn’t think as how you would, not really. Well, so long as I know. It’s to be the engineer, is it?’

  ‘No!’ I spoke by instinct, too flustered to think straight. ‘No, it’s… it’s not to be anybody, not yet. Maybe not for a long time. Mr Pooley, I… I’m flattered by your declaration, but… Too many other things weigh on me. Victor’s death, Mama’s illness, the farm… I can’t possibly think about marriage. Not yet.’

  Blue eyes narrowed incredulously, a light blazing behind them. ‘But you’re not turning me down? You’re not leaving me without hope?’

  ‘I…’ What could I say? At that moment the thought of marriage with anyone made me want to run away, but in the end, inevitably, I must make a choice. Since love was not to be a factor, did it matter which man I chose? ‘I’m not sure. I don’t know. Please don’t force me to make promises that I may not be able to keep.’

  ‘Oh, I won’t. I won’t!’ But even as he spoke he grabbed my hand and brought it to his lips, kissing my knuckles before folding my hand in both of his own, saying fervently, ‘It’s enough that you’ll think on it. It doesn’t matter for how long. I’m a patient man. You’ll see that. I’ll prove that I’m worthy of you. I’ll wait. Until you’re ready. However long it is. I’ll wait.’

  Disturbed by such intensity, I said, ‘And if the answer’s no, after all? If the waiting is for nothing?’

  ‘Then I’ll be content that you thought about it. I’ll know I had a fair chance. Oh, Miss Rose…’

  What he might have said, or done, I do not know; but at that moment I glimpsed the thatcher watching us, his head just visible beyond the ridge of the roof. I pulled my hand from Basil’s grasp.

  ‘Blast!’ he muttered, his eyes flashing. ‘Forgive me, Miss Rose. I’d not have folk talking. There’s been enough of that.’