by Maggie Hope
The captain said nothing. Jimmy glanced at him. Jack’s knuckles gleamed white as they gripped the wheel, his face set and dark. The scar on his face, which somehow Jimmy had hardly noticed at all since he’d got to know Jack better, stood out in an angry red line surrounded by white.
‘Mebbe he wasn’t telling the truth,’ the boy ventured.
Jack looked at him for a second, a cold, bitter look, but said nothing. They were both quiet all the way back to Bishop Auckland, Jack only speaking to ask Jimmy to get out and switch the headlights on as the electric switch in the car had failed.
‘You haven’t changed your mind about me going to school, have you?’ Jimmy ventured at last. They were coasting down the main road from Wolsingham to Witton-le-Wear, not far from home now. He had been worrying about it all the way down the dale.
‘What do you think?’ asked Jack.
‘I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.’
‘No, I haven’t changed my mind. But you’ll have to work like the blazes to catch up, you know.’
A wave of relief swept over Jimmy. He had been holding his breath for Jack’s reply. ‘I will, I promise I will,’ he said. ‘I’ll do anything.’ He looked over at Jack, grinning all over his face, but Jack hardly noticed. He was staring into the dark, the meagre illumination from the gas streetlights casting ghostly shadows on rows of houses lining the road as they entered the town. His thoughts were a whirl of confusion: bitterness, fury at the fates which had led to this. And a sense of betrayal – why had Elizabeth married that dreadful man?
Jimmy felt guilty and didn’t intrude on his companion’s thoughts again. He knew he should be unhappy about his sister but if he was honest he had to say, all he could think of now was his future, whether he would fit in at the grammar school, if he could do the work. Elizabeth was married. So he hadn’t liked her husband much, but there was nothing he could do about that, was there?
‘Where have you been?’
As Jack opened the front door of the Manor, he was met in the hall by his mother who was obviously furious with him.
‘Don’t start, Mother,’ he replied wearily.
‘Don’t start? Is that all you have to say? Here I’ve been, worried out of my mind wondering where you were. If anything had happened to you in that dreadful contraption you insist on going about in. Out of my mind, do you hear me?’
‘I hear you, Mother.’ Jack took off his hat and coat, looked at himself in the hall mirror, hardly recognising the hollow-eyed man staring back at him.
‘Do you know, I’ve had Mr Dunne asking where you were? He was expecting you at the mine, he said. Your father would never neglect to keep an appointment like that. Your father—’
‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ he said, his voice even, willpower keeping it so. ‘If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go straight up now.’
‘But aren’t you at least going to have the courtesy to tell me where you’ve been? And what about supper? Have you eaten?’
‘I don’t want anything, Mother. I’m tired, I’ll just go up, as I said.’
Olivia was left staring at his back as he disappeared up the staircase.
Once Jack had the bedroom door closed against the world, he flung off his clothes and got ready for bed mechanically. He sat on the side of the bed and unstrapped his feet, letting them drop to the floor any old how. He lay back on his pillows and closed his eyes.
Instantly, images of Elizabeth with that man rose to torture him. Why, oh, why, had she done it? Was it simply for a meal ticket for life? Or to be near the little sister Jimmy had mentioned? The questions ran round and round in his brain. He was filled with the hopelessness of it.
It was all his fault too. If he’d done something about Wilson that first time, gone to the commanding officer, he could have had the man transferred, saved Elizabeth from being dismissed. He could have been there when she came looking for him. If only he had been! His fault, not his mother’s. She had only done what was to be expected of any class-obsessed woman.
If only he’d spoken out, insisted Elizabeth marry him. Why had he hesitated? There were a thousand ‘if onlys’, but it was too late now. He turned over in bed restlessly. His legs hurt but at least it took his thoughts away from the greater agony in his mind. But not totally, nothing could do that. His life stretched before him: grey, dull, ugly, spoiled. And it was all his own fault.
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘JENNY! AH, JENNY—’
Jenny Nelson paused in her work to look around her. What was that? She pushed her thick hair back from her face, leaving a trail of mud on her forehead. Did someone speak or was it just a voice in the story she was telling herself in her mind? One of the stories she told herself all the time when she was out in the frozen fields, chopping away at the turnips – snagging them as the farmer called it – to provide extra feed for the sheep and cattle.
All was quiet, the field deserted. Nothing moved except the curl of smoke from the farmhouse in the distance, a dark stormy grey yet barely perceptible against the leaden colour of the sky. Where was Elizabeth? Jenny rose to her feet, as stiff as an old woman, after a couple of hours crouched on the hard, icy earth. Elizabeth could snag turnips standing up but Jenny had to get closer to them. After all, she was only ten, going on eleven, and her wrists were as thin as matchsticks, much like the rest of her.
‘The lass doesn’t look strong enough to snag turnips,’ the farmer had said to Elizabeth that morning.
‘But she is,’ Elizabeth had replied. ‘She’s good at it an’ all. Will she show you?’
Jenny had stood as tall as she could in her old black boots with the cardboard soles Elizabeth had cut for her only the night before. ‘We’ll get them soled in Frosterley on Friday, pet,’ Elizabeth had said then. ‘Both of us together. We’ll make a deal of money in a week, me and you, see if we don’t. And we’ll buy tickets to Auckland, go to Morton Main … our Jimmy will help us.’
Jenny wasn’t too sure about the money. In her experience they never did make as much as Elizabeth thought they would. But it would be grand to go on the train at last, as Elizabeth had always promised they would. See Jimmy. She could hardly remember him from the day he had come with her sister that very first time. But there had been a letter at Christmas and they had found it before Peart. He didn’t like them to get letters.
Sighing, Jenny bent over her work. Elizabeth must have gone into the coppice at the side of the house, that was where she’d told Jenny to go when she had to answer a call of nature. Anyroad, she thought as she chopped the top from a mud-caked turnip, the farmer hadn’t really cared whether she helped her sister or not. All he was interested in was that the work was done and done cheaply. As Elizabeth said, there was always farm work to be done and with the men away at the war, the farmers had to employ anyone they could get, no references needed here.
Peart didn’t know they’d got this job. He thought Jenny was at school and Elizabeth out looking for work.
‘I can’t afford to keep you both,’ he had snarled at them before he’d gone out that morning. Where he was going they didn’t know, but lately when he’d gone he was out all day so Elizabeth said he would never know they were earning money and then they could actually keep it.
‘Jenny? For God’s sake, where are you, Jenny?’
She sprang to her feet this time. Oh, yes, that had been Elizabeth calling and by the sound of her there was something desperately wrong, she sounded funny. She began to run towards the coppice.
‘Elizabeth? What’s the matter?’
The cry burst from Jenny as she struggled under a straggling branch of hawthorn and saw her sister lying on the ground, hands clutching her belly, face whiter than the frosted leaves on the bushes around her. And even as she watched, Elizabeth’s hands loosed their grasp and fell to the ground to either side, palms uppermost, open, fingers bent and broken nails pointing to the sky. Her eyes were closed and the only colour was in the pool of red soaking the earth around her, staini
ng her patched working skirt. A stain which was growing wider even as Jenny watched for a frozen second before snatching up Elizabeth’s old shawl which had caught on a bush and been pulled from her shoulders.
Jenny knelt by her, covering her with the shawl, taking the one from her own shoulders and pushing it under her sister’s inert body. Frantically she tried to warm Elizabeth’s hands, patted her cheeks.
‘Elizabeth! Oh, Elizabeth!’ she cried, a wailing desolate sound. And Elizabeth opened her eyes and looked at her and Jenny turned and ran for the farmhouse. The farmer’s wife would be in even if the farmer wasn’t.
The farmer’s wife was not in; the back door was firmly closed. There was no sign of the farmer or his wife. Jenny was distraught, didn’t know what to do. She hesitated, wringing her hands, then knocked again on the back door of the farmhouse. When there was no reply she went round to the front door which had that air of never having been opened. Jenny began to sob. She thought of running into Frosterley, but no, she knew in her heart there wasn’t time for that.
‘Sweet Jesus,’ she prayed aloud, ‘don’t let Elizabeth die.’ A cat mewed beside her, the rangy old farm cat. It rubbed itself against her legs and then, evidently deciding that Jenny was not going to feed it, stalked off to the open barn door where Jenny could hear kittens mewing excitedly. If she could only get Elizabeth into the barn, thought Jenny, she could cover her with hay, make her warm.
Elizabeth was not asleep, nor unconscious, nor yet awake. She had felt very cold a few minutes ago but now she was warmer. The pain in her belly was still there but somehow it was something apart from her altogether. She was floating somewhere, she wasn’t sure … She was a bairn again, working in the field with her mother, they were snagging turnips. Only she had fallen down. She would have to get up and get on with the work because Mam wasn’t very well and they needed the money now Da had run off. Mam was badly, she kept holding her back.
‘What’s the matter?’ Elizabeth asked her. ‘Mam, are you all right?’
‘Just get on, Elizabeth,’ her mother said, and Elizabeth got on her feet and found her snagger and bent over her work. But when she looked up, her mam was gone. Maybe she was in the little wood at the side. Elizabeth was working and working and Mam didn’t come back. Maybe she was having a rest. Elizabeth worked on but then she thought she would go and find her mother and wandered over to the wood and something was moaning in there, an animal, it sounded like, caught in one of the farmer’s traps. She went in under the trees but it wasn’t an animal moaning at all, it was her mam. Elizabeth cried out, ‘Mam! Mam!’ in a desperate cry of panic and fear.
She came to with a start. Everything was whirling round her. She was in a wood, all right. After a minute she recognised it; it was the coppice by the side of the turnip field. For a moment she panicked. Oh, God, she was going to die, she was going to die just like her mam had died, out in the fields like an abandoned animal. And what would happen to Jenny then, who would look after her little sister?
‘Somebody will.’
Elizabeth wasn’t sure if the voice was real or in her head. But, strangely, she believed it. All she had to do was let go and she would float away. There was nothing to worry about now, nothing at all, because none of it mattered.
A blackbird was pecking about on the ground close to her head, its brightly coloured beak chipping at frozen leaves, turning them over. He must be finding something to eat, Elizabeth thought dreamily, though what, she couldn’t imagine. Quietly she waited, not quite ready to go, but she would soon, in a minute. There was a patch of blue above her, a gap in the overhanging bushes. Another bird flew across, landing near. It was a hen blackbird. She too began pecking industriously at the floor. A drop of water fell on Elizabeth’s face, splashing into her eyes so that she blinked. The ice was melting. Soon it would be spring, she thought, and closed her eyes and drifted off.
A sound filtered through, dragging her back to consciousness. It was a blackbird singing. Reluctantly, Elizabeth opened her eyes. She didn’t want to wake up, no, she didn’t. Still the blackbird sang so gloriously. There he was, sitting on an elder branch, a proud, perky little thing, puffing out his chest and singing to his mate, full of the promise of the spring which was coming.
‘I’m not my mother,’ Elizabeth said suddenly, barely above a breath but loud in her head. ‘I’m me and I’m not going to die.’
‘Elizabeth? Oh, Elizabeth, you’re not dead, are you?’
It was Jenny. She was back, with a bogie, a low four-wheeled cart with a rope handle to pull it along which she’d found in the farmer’s barn.
‘I’m not dead. And I’m not going to be, pet,’ said Elizabeth, her voice a little stronger. She was even able to help herself a little as Jenny pulled her onto the bogie and covered her with old sacks she’d brought from the meal house. Jenny was sobbing as she hitched the rope over her thin shoulder and pulled, leaning forward, almost bent double with the effort. Elizabeth wanted to tell her not to cry, not to worry, she had decided to live after all.
They reached the barn at last and Jenny made a nest in the hay, piling it round her sister then standing back to view her work, then bending to smooth hay and thick black hair away from Elizabeth’s face.
‘The farmer’s out, you see, and the farmer’s wife an’ all,’ she said. ‘I’ll go down into Frosterley and get the doctor. Will you be all right, our Elizabeth?’
‘I will, petal. I’m as warm as toast now, you’ve done grand.’
Jenny surveyed her doubtfully. Elizabeth had a half-smile playing around her mouth but she was so white, as white as the frost on the ground.
‘I don’t know if I can leave you.’ The girl fretted and chewed her lip in indecision.
‘Go on, I’ll be all right now,’ Elizabeth encouraged her, and Jenny ran out of the barn, boots clattering on the stones in the yard then fading into silence as she went down the road which led to the village. Elizabeth closed her eyes. She was tired, so tired.
She had lost the baby she didn’t even know she was carrying. For a moment she mourned for it, but it was Peart’s baby too, and she didn’t want her baby to have Peart for a father, did she? Safe in the arms of Jesus, she thought. That was what someone had said when her mother died, and that was where her baby was too.
She knew she would get better now, she was no longer bleeding and, most important of all, she had the heart now, more than she had had for months, the heart to take charge of her own life and do something with it. Never again, she told herself, never again would Peart or any man use her without her consent. She was eighteen years old or very soon would be. A woman. She would shape her own life and look after Jenny while she was doing it.
‘Hey, what’s going on here?’
It was the farmer, Elizabeth didn’t even know his name, she had been working in his fields for only a day.
‘I … I took badly,’ she said.
His round red face came closer as he squatted on his haunches and stared at her. ‘Mind,’ he said, his tone changing, ‘you look it an’ all. Hang on a minute, I’ll get the wife.’ He went to the door of the barn and hollered across the yard. ‘Dot! Dorothy! Howay here a minute, will you?’
Within a very few minutes Elizabeth was installed on the sofa in the farmhouse kitchen. The room was warm from the fire which had been coaxed into a blaze in an instant and Dorothy, the farmer’s wife, handed her a bowl of beef broth from the great iron pan on the bar and was encouraging her to eat it.
‘Just a mouthful or two, lass, it’ll put new life into you.’ Dorothy, as fat and red-faced as her husband, hovered over her. ‘A little more then, surely you can manage a little more? You’ll never get better if you don’t eat,’ she said.
Elizabeth blushed as she thought of what the woman had done for her, changing her out of the blood-soaked clothes into one of her own nighties and giving her clean monthly clouts to keep her decent. By the time Jenny got back with the doctor, a broad, squat Scot from Glasgow, she already had a lit
tle colour in her cheeks as she lay, propped on pillows, looking a different woman from the one Jenny had left.
‘Well,’ he said, frowning heavily, ‘I thought, judging by the lassie here, you were at death’s door. I left my dinner to come up here, young woman.’
Jenny was unabashed. She was too busy grinning all over her face with relief as she gazed at her sister. The doctor examined Elizabeth, prodding her stomach hard and making her wince, asked about the blood loss, hummed and hawed with his fingers rubbing his chin.
‘You’ve been a lucky lassie, I can tell you that,’ he pronounced. ‘I thought I’d have to take you into the cottage hospital, that’s if I found you alive. But now …’ He looked up inquiringly at the farmer’s wife.
‘She can bide here, the bairn an’ all,’ said Dorothy. ‘That is … unless you would like to be taken home?’ She gazed at Elizabeth then Jenny. Somehow, Dorothy didn’t think either of them wanted to go home, wherever that was, though she had heard stories of that bugger Peart who was more pig than man having a fancy piece. By the look of dismay on the little ’un’s face, though, if that was where they came from they certainly didn’t want to go back. Dorothy smiled, satisfied, when Elizabeth assured her that they would love to stay here.
After all, it was lonely on the farm when her man was out working and it was going to be nice company for her.
A couple of days later, Peart appeared at the farm gate as the farmer was taking his two milking cows into the dairy.
‘Have you seen owt of a young lass and a bairn – about ten, the bairn is?’ asked Peart.
‘No, I haven’t,’ snapped the farmer, looking him straight in the eye. ‘An’ I’ll thank you to get out of my way, I have work to do.’ Hell’s bells, he thought, how had that nice young lass got herself tangled up with an excuse for a man like Peart? Neither use nor ornament he was, a disgrace to the dale.
Peart went on his way, shuffling and stoop-shouldered, his eyes bleary and his head thumping from the liquor he had consumed the night before.
