‘I don’t want to disappoint the dear ladies,’ drawled Sydney. ‘They expect us to dress like this, you know, and to spit and swear and sing dirty songs. I wouldn’t wish to let them down. Aren’t you two coming with us?’
Hannah and Tim looked at each other and she said. ‘No, I’m tired and I want Tim to stay at home and keep me company.’
‘He seems to be doing that very well,’ commented Sydney, wryly. ‘All right, we’re going and so are Panhandle and Gold Tooth and about twenty of the others. I’ve even persuaded Major Bob to turn up. I hope she doesn’t get saved or she’ll talk my ears right off. They’re all on their way to Rosewell now. When it’s over I’ll come back and tell you what happens.’
Hannah waved an admonitory finger at him. ‘Don’t you go causing trouble. Those ladies mean well. They’re trying to help and there’s a lot of people in this camp who need it.’
Sydney put a hand on his white shirt-front. ‘Me? Cause trouble? Never, my dear. I’ll be the soul of – the soul of what? Never mind, I’ll be the soul they’re looking for. I’ll let them save me.’
‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ said Tim as Sydney’s laughter died away.
In Bella Vista Francine was fussing around her mistress, pulling out the edges of her lace fichu, fluffing up her curls. ‘But I’ll be all crumpled by the time I get there,’ said Bethya sharply. ‘I wish you’d come with me. The other ladies will have their maids to help them.’
Francine’s face went stiff. ‘I can’t come, Madame, please don’t ask me. I’m terrified in case I meet that man again.’
‘How silly. What could he do in a crowd like that anyway? I’d look after you. You can’t hide from men all your life, Francine.’
The maid whipped round. ‘I wish I could. I hate them. I hate the way they look and I hate the way they smell. I hate them!’ There was such fury in her voice that Bethya was genuinely startled. She hadn’t taken Francine’s reclusiveness too seriously before, for she thought her maid was only shy and that one day she’d meet a man who would change all that because she was a striking-looking girl.
‘Goodness, how violent you are. Why do you feel like that?’ she asked in a wondering voice.
Francine’s hands were shaking as she rearranged the ornaments on the dressing table. ‘I hate them, that’s all. I’ve had some bad experiences,’ she said in a trembling voice.
Bethya patted her on the shoulder. ‘Haven’t we all, my dear. All right, I won’t argue with you any longer. I’ll go to the soiree with Gus’ mother, the old dragon. I wonder if that odd man who always seems to be laughing at me will be there? I hope not, he makes me feel so uncomfortable.’ Francine’s eyes, as she listened to her mistress, took on a wary look but she said nothing.
Rosewell Square was crowded with carriages when the Anstruther barouche drew up. Everybody who was anybody had come to help at the Duchess’ charitable occasion. Inside the hall were a line of long tables loaded with buttered bread, scones and colourful cakes. Ladies in lovely gowns rushed about with cups of tea in their hands, pressing them on bewildered-looking women and ragged children. There were far more helpers than those needing to be helped.
The Parish Church minister and his prim-mouthed wife stood with the Duchess at the end of the hall surveying the gathering. The Duchess looked formidable in a scarlet gown and a huge bonnet, out of which a purple aigrette rose in the air like the favour of a mediaeval knight. ‘I hope more than this will come,’ she said in a ringing tone. ‘There’s only women and children here. Where are the men? They’re the ones who need saving.’
At that moment the hall door was thrown open and in marched a body of at least thirty navvies, all in their best and brightest clothes. Some of them were genuinely interested, but Sydney’s little group of ten or twelve were only out for a joke and were looking to him with his cruel wit to provide it for them. He walked in last of all and surveyed the crowd with an imperious eye. The first person he noticed was the beautiful young Mrs Anstruther, whose glorious dark hair and alabaster skin excited his admiration. He thought she looked like an exquisite doll but he felt he had her measure. He knew she was an adventuress through and through. This was all going to be much better fun if she was watching.
He started by marching up to the Duchess, elbowing the minister aside and grasping her gloved hand in his. ‘God bless you, mum. God bless you,’ he said in what he hoped was an authentic rural Shropshire accent.
Taken aback, the Duchess drew away from him but he kept her hand pinioned in his. ‘What you’re doing is a saintly thing,’ he said loudly, gesturing with his chin at the tables of food. ‘All this grub and us starving.’
She rapped him firmly over the knuckles with the handle of her parasol and he let go of her hand. ‘Please go and sit down, young man,’ she said. She was thinking, how strange – it was as though she knew him from somewhere, but that was impossible… A feeling of disquiet filled her, as, with an exaggerated bow that would have seemed fulsome at the grovelling court of Louis XIV, Sydney retired.
While the Minister was saying Grace, there were heavy sighs and sounds of enthusiastic agreement from Sydney’s part of the hall, but mercifully he stayed quiet during the tea, which was eaten with relish by the guests, especially the children. After the plates were emptied, the Duchess stood up from her place and with a sharp tap of her parasol on the floor, announced, ‘Ladies and gentleman, Mr Patterson, our minister at Rosewell Paris Church, will now give an address.’
Silence fell. Mr Patterson stood up and launched into his talk in a mellifluous, pious-sounding voice. ‘Dear friends,’ he began, ‘I hope you do not mind me calling you my friends, because you are my friends. This delightful event which Her Grace has so generously provided for us all has proved that. Dear friends, I have come here today to ask you to consider your ways. To ask you to wonder if you are doing the best with your lives, to ask yourselves if, when you answer to Our Father in Heaven, you will be able to say, “I tried my best, I did everything I could, I behaved well…”’
The devil entered into Sydney then. With a dramatic flourish he gave a strangled sob and sank his head in his hand. The Minister looked across at him with sympathy but went on: ‘Some of you will have knowingly or unknowingly committed sins. These sins may be small or they may be great, they may be sins of omission or sins of commission, but when you come to the Day of Judgement, they will all be added up in your account. Do you drink? Do you take the Lord’s name in vain? Do you tell lies? Have any of you –’ dreadful pause – ‘committed even more serious sins? Have you stolen something that does not belong to you? Have you committed adultery?’
Sydney sobbed again, more loudly this time. Heads turned to look at him. Bethya saw who was making so much noise and her eyes widened in alarm for she had an intuition that Sydney’s remorse was not genuine. She knew the object of the soiree was to persuade navvies to lead better lives, but she suspected Sydney of playing games. ‘I hope the Duchess doesn’t see through him, too, and never finds out that I was the one who invited him here,’ she thought in a panic.
The Minister was well launched into his theme now, elaborating on the evils awaiting sinners in hell compared to the pure delights of heaven. He concluded by telling his listeners, ‘All you have to do is repent, stiffen your resolve to withstand evil. Swear today that you will repudiate evil, but most of all that you will never again touch a drop of alcohol! If you make that pledge, God will be on your side.’
There was a stricken silence in the hall while he paused and held up both hands to give his final blessing, but before he could get the words out, a man came dashing from the back of the crowd and threw himself at the Minister’s feet. It was Sydney, of course. He was thoroughly enjoying himself playing the fool.
‘What a magnificent address. You’ve made me see the light. I’ve been a terrible sinner. I’ve dallied with women, I’ve sworn and gambled and drunk fifteen mugs of beer a day for the past five years but now I’m going to stop. You’ve s
hown me the way, oh thank you, thank you!’ he howled.
His performance was so histrionic that even Major Bob thought he was serious. She stood up from her seat and gasped, ‘Oh, poor soul – he’s not that bad! What’s happened to him? I’ll stop drinking too. I’ll give it all up and go to live with my daughter in Liverpool who’s married to a lawyer.’
Sydney could hardly believe his luck when he heard her. He moved back and let Major Bob go forward to the Minister who took her hand in his, glad that his preaching had fallen on fertile ground. The Duchess was more sceptical, however. Her eye was on Sydney and she saw the mocking expression on his face.
At that point her son the Duke arrived at the hall door. He had come to put in an appearance at his mother’s soiree and to escort her home. He strode towards the platform just when the Minister was about to bless Sydney, and as he stepped up beside the sobbing man, he gave a start of surprise. Sydney looked up, met his eyes and had the grace to look abashed. ‘Godders!’ exclaimed the Duke, in a tone of total astonishment.
Sydney rolled his eyes and gave a heartrending sob, put his hands over his face and backed away, choking out in his rustic accent, ‘Me sins are too great, m’lud. I can’t bear it.’ While the gathering watched in amazement he fled for the door and disappeared.
The Duke looked up at his astonished mother and asked, ‘What’s going on? What on earth was he doing?’
Mr Patterson spoke first. ‘He was repenting of his sins, Your Grace.’
The Duke turned and stared at the half-open hall door. There was no sign of Sydney. He shook his head. ‘I doubt it. I really do.’
‘So do I,’ said his mother acidly. ‘Do you know him, Richard?’ If the Duchess had not been so discomfited by the strange behaviour of the navvy, the look in her son’s eye would have alerted her to the fact that he was keeping something from her.
‘I thought I did, Mother, but I must be wrong,’ he said.
The disruption meant that the impact of the Minister’s address was lost, and the guests began drifting away with only a few taking the temperance pledge. Major Bob was among them, however.
To her own surprise, Bethya found that she was shaking with nerves when the affair ended, so rattled that she could hardly join in when her friends began speculating about the navvy’s strange behaviour.
‘Do you think he really had some sort of revelation?’ they asked each other, but Bethya only shook her head and said, ‘I’ve no idea. It was so strange…’ Inside, though, she was fuming. She felt that part of Sydney’s charade – for she was sure it was a charade – had been directed at her, and this made her furious.
‘What have I done that he wants to make fun of me like that?’ she asked Francine when she reached home at last.
The maid shrugged. ‘Perhaps he is mad.’
‘He didn’t look mad. In fact, he looked as if the whole thing was a huge joke to him. It made me very angry.’
‘It is best to avoid him,’ Francine counselled her grimly.
‘Of course I will,’ cried Bethya. ‘I hope I never lay eyes on him again.’
After the soiree, summer came into its full glory. From early morning till late at night the sun shone down from a cloudless sky and the river which ran like a raging torrent in winter dwindled into a mild little stream that was possible to ford in places. Local people crossed it on stilts, a custom that was copied by the navvies who were now working on both banks. In the river bed, huge boulders, some only seen once in fifty years, stuck up starkly, and around the foundations of the old stone bridge, the hard-packed woolsacks of the foundations were clearly visible.
It was the most magnificent summer in living memory. The navvies stripped to their waist and laboured under a tropical blaze that turned their skin to the colour of mahogany. The sun dried out and cracked into wide fissures the earth they were digging; water spilled on it scattered like diamond droplets and then disappeared. It was as if the thirsty soil gulped them down.
The vista up the valley was half-obscured in a perpetual heat haze, with hill-tops seeming to swim above the ground like islands in a dreamy sea. When evening came the sky presented a pyrotechnical glory of purples, oranges, yellows and reds that filled it like a huge canvas. As day after brilliant day went by, gardens grew parched and leaves on the trees drooped grey and colourless because they were coated with a fine film of dust. People dragged buckets of water up from wells and rivers to slake the thirst of their flowers and vegetables, but the crops stopped thriving. They needed a downpour from heaven.
Camptounfoot was lucky, for it had many wells, sunk centuries before by the Romans and still in daily use. Almost every garden had one, neatly lined with blocks of red sandstone and covered over with a wooden lid, which, when lifted off, showed a green and glittering surface far below. Through all the days of drought, the wells still smelt sweet, though it took longer and longer to lower the buckets and a harder haul to pull them up again. Never in living memory had Camptounfoot’s wells run dry, but after six weeks without rain wiseacres shook their heads and predicted that a calamity might occur if the dry spell did not break soon.
In spite of its name Rosewell did not have so adequate a water supply as Camptounfoot. The monks who built the Abbey had led piped water into it and to the houses that surrounded it, and later a big well was dug in the town square. Cottages along the river bank relied on its flow or its tributary streams for their water supply, but now that was running dangerously low too and the demands on the town well increased. The town magistrates imposed a time limit for bucket-filling – from six in the morning till half-past eight, and from six till eight at night. With moderation, they reckoned, the water supply would hold out till the rains came, as come they must. Now every morning people stood in the gardens and scanned the cloudless sky in hope of seeing a drift of white above the hills but they were disappointed.
The navvy camp was badly hit by the lack of water. The stream which was its main supply had dwindled to a trickle and women had to walk to Rosewell Square with their buckets to fill them at the town well, much to the annoyance of townspeople who resented what little water was left being drawn off by the navvies. When Hannah told him about the water available in Camptounfoot, Tim Maquire organised a daily water-cart to trundle from the village to the camp where its liquid load was given out at the rate of half a bucket per person.
The water problem did not greatly concern Christopher Wylie, who wanted the good weather to continue for as long as possible. He couldn’t believe his luck in being blessed with such fine working conditions, and urged his men on to get the piers finished before the weather broke and the river became a torrent again. Daily the stonework rose, line upon line of neatly hewn blocks, gaining height but dwindling in thickness as they reared towards the sky. Wylie watched from the bank, fanning his face with a shady hat. On the day the first of the piers attained the height of one hundred feet, he threw this hat in the air and cheered like a boy. The next two were not long in reaching that height as well but the fourth pier – the one in the river that had given so much trouble — finally had to be redug; more cartloads of woolsacks arrived from Maddiston to be laid on rocks and concrete at the bottom of the huge cavity. Down they went, one upon the other, while Jopp and other sceptics eyed the work with disbelief.
‘That’ll never stand the first flood,’ they said, but Wylie refused to be discouraged.
‘I think it will, but I’m not going to take any chances. We’ll only build the bottom of this foundation. We’ll make it solid to above water level and then we’ll leave it over the winter. If it withstands the floods, it’ll withstand anything, and next spring we’ll build the pier up to the same height as the others,’ he announced. His absorption in his work allowed him to forget his anxiety about Arabella. Emma Jane’s letters informed him that she was making a slow recovery, so at least she was not any worse. He wrote back and promised that when the good weather broke, he’d take some time off and travel to Newcastle to see them all.
‘I’ve got to finish this bridge as fast as I can, and everything’s going well at the moment so I’ll run with it. I’ll rest when it’s over – then it’s off to Menton with my wife and daughter to sit in the sun with my feet up like a gentleman.’
Tim laughed. ‘I hope you do, but knowing you I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t go off and start building something else. We’d have to put you in leg-irons to make you stop, I think.’
During the hottest weather Tim had his own worries: for Hannah who was finding it hard to bear. No longer could she walk to her mother’s every day, and carrying heavy buckets of water from the cart or the burn to Benjy’s was almost beyond her, so Tim paid one of the camp urchins to fetch and carry for his wife. The child was idle and had to be continually chivvied, which was tiring and annoying for Hannah.
‘Why don’t you go to stay at your mother’s now?’ he anxiously asked her on a morning when he saw her walking slowly across the floor with one hand pressed hard against the small of her back. There were few women in the camp he would trust with helping his precious wife when she went into labour.
Hannah was unwilling. ‘Not yet,’ she said.
‘I think you should go now. Go back with your mother when she comes to see you today,’ he told her, and worry made his voice sharp.
She frowned. ‘You’re very anxious to get rid of me, aren’t you? It’s not time yet, I tell you. I haven’t even had a twinge and people say you always get plenty of warning. I’ll go when that happens.’
‘But what if it starts when you’re alone – before your mother comes or when I’m out?’
A Bridge in Time Page 32
