by Jean Chapman
It seemed that the Abbotts and the Greenaughs were not to be easy bedfellows, she thought, and the nature of the comparison had her at once bubbling with secret laughter. She kept her face firmly to the front as Cato paced concernedly behind.
3
Belle in no way connected the vague mechanical noise she awoke to the next day with anything that might thwart her intentions of wandering once more in the direction of the bridle-path. Quite the contrary. She stretched purposefully, arching first her back, then stretching arms, hands and fingers wide, as if to make sure of full span to take her share of the day. She repeated the process with her legs, pointing down and spreading her toes in the same instinctive and daily repeated return to full wakefulness. It was an inborn ritual her father had watched and wondered at even when she had roused as a baby. Her mother described it as ‘Belle’s daily squirm’. Sam felt that was too easy and naïve a description. He thought it looked more as if she was checking to make sure everything she needed was still around.
The noise undoubtedly meant that the Abbotts had their engines up near the mutual boundary of the farms, and that Cato Abbott might be there. She could imagine him standing tall, heroic, on his footplate, pushing and pulling a lever or two, spinning the steering wheel. Instead of her usual leap out of bed to begin to organise the day as fast as possible for her own particular benefit, Belle nestled back into a ball, curling around these waking thoughts as if they were fledglings that need careful nursing to feather and take wing. Her plans had hardly begun to take shape when the latch of her bedroom door rattled and her mother came in carrying a cup of tea.
‘Not up!’ Mabel was astonished. ‘Not sickening for anything, are you?’ Belle frowned, and said she had only just woken.
‘Well, stir yourself. Tweeny’s here, and ready to help with laying out the first of the keeping apples in the loft.’
‘Oh no,’ Belle remonstrated. ‘Do I have to?’
‘You know as well as I do, she can’t be trusted to do anything on her own, and I’ve certainly no time to organise her today. I want to make the damson jam. Your father’s gone to fetch some more fencing posts - so…’
Belle dwelt on the problem of Tweeny Alsopp, a shapeless lump of a girl, who at fifteen had neither wit nor beauty, or as the villagers put it ‘was neither use nor ornament’. Her nickname had came from the general judgement that she was neither one thing nor the other, but Mabel Greenaugh had found she was employable if supervised, and if Tweeny thought she was pleasing someone with her efforts, then she had a capacity for work that left many another girl standing. If she had been more personable, no doubt her mother would have been able to place her in residential service. As it was, every weekday morning she walked up to Hall Farm, accompanied by Mary, her slightly younger, but brighter, sister, who also helped in the house.
Belle placed the tea on a chair, and went to finger through a few lengths of ribbon she had in a drawer. Red, green, yellow — she tried each one against her hair, then she rummaged again, and found a hand-worked lace collar. She tried this around her neck and then pushed it into the pocket of the apron she would wear when she dressed.
Belle found the loft and Tweeny equally restricting, and once established up there with sacks of straw and two huge skips of apples, she wasted no time. She showed the girl how to spread the straw and make a hollow in it to keep the apple upright as it had grown on the tree, and not to let one apple touch another. ‘See, Tweeny?’ she asked hopefully. Tweeny beamed at her and flopped on to her bottom, sitting like some grotesque toddler about to become engrossed in a game. Carefully Tweeny took the straw and shaped it into an apple-sized nest, and carefully and triumphantly placed an apple into it. Belle raised her eyebrows in exasperation; at that speed it would take about a fortnight to lay all the apples out for storing. But she nodded at the beaming upturned face. She let her make one more nest, and place in one more apple, before catching the girl’s arm and indicating the skips of apples, the bags of straw and the empty wooden floor of the loft and said: ‘You put all the apples out on the straw and’ - she drew the collar from her pocket — ‘this is yours.’ The girl’s eyes brightened and she nodded as Belle slipped the collar around the frayed neck of Tweeny’s dress. ‘Yes, yes,’ she answered, one thick-fingered hand going up to touch and hold the collar.
‘Yes,’ Belle answered, twitching the lace away again. ‘When you’ve done the apples.’ For a moment the face dulled again and she mumbled ‘the apples’. ‘Yes,’ Belle emphasised, and shook the collar at her again, ‘then you have this. A slow dawning wonder lit up Tweeny’s face again, and with a contented grunt of understanding she began her laborious task.
Belle climbed quietly down the broad wooden steps of the loft ladder to make her escape. She had reached the bottom step when she heard Levi’s raised voice outside in the yard. He sounded in some state of excited agitation as he talked to her mother.
‘Where’s gaffer? Where’s gaffer? There’ll be trouble now and no mistake. Them’s got one of them engines in ditch, keeled over, it is, and taken one of gaffer’s gates with it. Not only that, but it’s hitched up to a great trailcrload of stone, and that’s over the hedge in gaffer’s top meadow!’
‘Stone?’ her mother queried.
‘Aye, they’re going to lay stone foundations all along bridle-way!’
Even Belle was impressed by the size of the catastrophe, and gave a grimace of agreement with Levi. Gaffer would not be pleased. She could hardly wait as her mother persuaded Levi inside for a cooling drink.
That there was something very much amiss was clear a long time before she reached the scene, for she could hear men shouting conflicting orders and abuse at each other. She approached cautiously; she had no wish to inhibit the action. She saw that a traction-engine was slewed over so it lay almost on its side, both wheels well down into what had obviously been a grass-covered ditch. The result was that two large, high-sided trailers had been pulled violently over, and the loads of hard granite caterpulted into her father’s field. His herd of brown and white Ayrshire cows were huddled in the far corner. The dispute about the best method of retrieving the situation was being carried on in shouts above the excess steam escaping violently from the pressure valve. She could see Mordichi Evans and several other men who had been on the sawing equipment in the village, but she could not see Cato or his father.
She was about to turn away when there was a sudden pause in the activity, and for a few seconds the only noise was the steam, and the crackle of a small grass blaze around the spot where the fire from the traction-engine had been hastily drawn and thrown aside. Standing on tip-toe, she followed the gaze of the men along the track and realised what they were anticipating was the arrival of her father, riding on one of the larger farm carts loaded with hedge-stakes, together with his four general farm labourers. It struck Belle then that it was unusual for five of the men to be together, unless they were haymaking or harvesting. She wondered if her father had come prepared for trouble.
Whether he had come prepared for trouble or not, he was certainly not prepared for the scene of devastation that met his eyes. Belle saw him stand up on the cart shafts as he drew nearer. She saw disbelief, then fury, on his face - and she saw Joe Abbott approaching from the direction of Glebe Farm, walking with one of the Evans boys, who by his gesticulations was explaining the accident. Belle felt it was like waiting for the conflict of snake and hawk both hunting the same rabbit, neither going to give way. She felt a thrill, a kind of joyful awe at the battle to come, particularly if, as she calculated, it might give her the chance to find Cato at some other point in this stone-carrying operation. She knew the gravel must be coming from the five-mile-distant quarry. It was possible Cato was driving another engine, coming at this very moment ever nearer to the impending dispute.
She was thrilling to the prospect of being able to procure another ‘casual’ meeting, as the first words of the encounter came from her father.
‘What the hell …?�
�
‘One of them things, zur, an accident, like.’ Mordichi Evans assumed a more rural accent to answer, pending his employer’s arrival on the scene.
‘My God!’ Sam exploded, jumping down and climbing over the remainder of his hedge and gate to view the damage from the field. He threw an arm out expressively at the two tons of stone littering his pasture. ‘What the hell do you think y’re doing?’ he shouted at Joe Abbott, who had now arrived and was sizing up his engine in the ditch.
‘Well, stone-carrying ready to lay foundations for a yard and on this path here …’ Joe pushed back his greasy black cap and scratched his head. ‘But looks like we’ve hit a snag.’ His understatement was, Belle felt, like Mordichi’s accent, an effort to placate. But - she raised her eyebrows, waiting for the outburst - they did not know her father. What might be all in a day’s work to some men, would be plotting and drama to Sam. As Levi had once - Belle thought very astutely - grumbled: ‘Sam Greenaugh’s got a chip on his shoulder because he wasn’t born God.’
‘A snag! I’d call it devastation!’
‘Aye - you’ll need a few extra hedging stakes.’ The voice came without particular emphasis, and no one seemed sure which of Joe’s men had spoken, and no betraying head turned. It was one of Sam’s own men who sniggered. Sam spun round as if struck. ‘Is one of you trying to make a fool of me?’ he threatened.
‘There’s nothing done that can’t be put right …’ Joe began, diverting the fury.
‘Put right!’ Sam shouted. ‘Put right!’ Belle thought he looked and sounded like a ranting preacher from the ranks of some latter-day Bible-moths. ‘Looks to me like nothing’ll ever be right again until you and your lot have left this place — and let’s hope it’s as quick as you’ve come.’
There was a moment’s silence, made deeper by the sudden ceasing of the steam reducing the pressure in the stricken engine. The only sounds that crept to the ear were those of birds high in old trees, and of insects buzzing lazily in the growing blaze of the sun’s heat.
‘I’m sorry for you then, Mr Greenaugh,’ Joe Abbott said with slow, heavy emphasis, ‘because we’re here to stay - so you’d best get used to the idea — but it’s obviously no use trying to talk reason with you.’ He turned immediately, as if finding his irate neighbour of no further interest or concern, and began to give orders for one of the boys to go and fetch Cato from the farm, with the Clayton engine and the newest steel hawsers, so they could begin to heave their equipment back on to the path again.
Belle vaguely heard her father shouting about the law, as she considered the possibilities of running ahead to Glebe Farm. She was certainly not deterred by the thought of the younger son, John — who, Cato said, was just her age — but Mrs Abbott was an unknown quantity. Cato had an added respect in his voice when he spoke of his mother, and the growing intricacies of this antagonism between the two families hardly warranted a straight-forward approach — a flustered run up to the kitchen door with news of the mishap, a hasty introduction of herself, and the relayed message for Cato … No, she decided, better to make it far more casual. She would go to where the bridle-path branched, one spur going at right angles to the Glebe lands and the other wending its tangled, long-neglected way to the more distant village of Rodborough.
She was studiously collecting haws from the hedgerow and nibbling the yellow flesh around each hard pip, and hardly seemed aware of the chugging approach of the traction-engine. When Cato stopped she looked up quite casually and called, ‘Good morning.’
‘Good morning to you,’ he called back. ‘You’re about early.’ But he made no attempt to leave his footplate, and she pouted up at him.
‘Just looking for a few extra blackberries to make some blackberry and apple jam,’ she improvised. As he made no move, she turned away to stretch for a spray of large succulent berries. One touch, and they fell ripe and staining into her palm. She recollected that she could make the farm-boy break into a sweat by the merest waggle of her hips, and wondered if the same tactic might lure Cato away from his message for a few moments.
Cato did not miss a movement. Amused by the sheer naughtiness of her, he wondered which he wanted to do most - spank her or stroke the length of that bare brown arm on its pretended occupation of plucking blackberries; both, he thought. He was tempted to point out that she seemed to have lost her container for the berries, but he felt a warmth for her that made him reluctant to part with her company. She brought him to life with a joy he thought had been permanently buried in the mud of Flanders. He wanted to catch and keep her like some beautiful butterfly, but was afraid of bruising her wings. Yet he was conscious of the contradiction in her. She was weakness and strength, and he knew instinctively she could be both to him - his weakness and his strength. He was tempted to abandon his engine and go after her as she peered and plucked her way along the hedge, but perhaps like many a wild creature she should be tempted rather than trapped - and his father was waiting for help. He eased the Clayton back into gear, and as it chugged the first few inches forward he wondered why he should think of Belle Greenaugh as a wild creature. He gave a last glance at her as she moved away, and grinned to himself. Perhaps it was the way she walked. That was enough to make any man wild!
As soon as he turned on to the bridle-path to face the direction of the mishap, he realised there was far more amiss than a ditched engine. He could see a pillar of black smoke rising straight up into the still heat of the sky. He frowned and calculated that whatever the cause, if there was a steam-engine in the vicinity - particularly an overturned one - it would be blamed. There would be no use talking about the spark-arresters so religiously used on all his father’s smoke-stacks. He pushed the Clayton to its full capacity, and must have approached six miles an hour even on that neglected track.
He came to the scene of the upset, found his way blocked by a horse and cart, the overturned engine, trailers, the scattered stone - but not a man in sight. Instinctively he looked for the fire drawn from the engine, and saw it contained in a circle of burnt grass, practically out and certainly not the cause of the fire further along the track. Even so, he hoped they could get it under control before anyone from Hall Farm spotted the smoke. He knew little of Belle’s father as yet, but from what he had seen of the man he did not relish a ‘discussion’ with him on the distance a live spark could travel.
It was evident the fire was spreading at an alarming speed. There was a roar of flames, a staccato crackling as of sporadic machine-gun fire. The smoke now seemed to be racing in great black billows to meet him. Then he rounded a slight bend and saw the flames. Even he was appalled by their height, their heat and their energy as they leapt at trees, bushes and grasses made tinder-dry by the long hot summer and the autumnal tall of the sap. He felt his nerves tingle, his flesh creep, for he found himself anticipating the fall of shells, the screams of wounded - the war-image heightened by the movement of men in black silhouette across the reds and oranges of the gluttonous tongues of flame.
Then he recognised his father and saw him stumble over a root. He ran to grab his arm and draw him back from the blaze. Joe gratefully grasped his elder son’s arm, sweeping his other hand hastily across his brow to clear it of the sweat that blinded him.
‘The only way we can stop it is to make a fire-break,’ he shouted above the noise of the blaze.
‘The engine …’ Cato began. Joe nodded urgently, then turned immediately to reorganise his men, who had been overtaken by flames which shot, quicker than a man could run, across the seeded, head-heavy grasses.
The heat from the fire of the engine seemed nothing after the intensity of the flames on the path, and Cato stoked the boiler as quickly as he could and was just ready to move off when he heard a voice.
‘What is it?’ Belle called as she ran back towards him, all artifice forgotten. ‘What’s on fire?’
‘Most of the woodland either side of the path by now, I should think. We’re going to make a fire-break.’ He was moving forward
even as he shouted to her. ‘Run to the farms, send as many men as you can find - as quick as you can!’ He caught a glimpse of her as she turned and ran, swift and light as a young wild deer, and his heart lifted with the delight of her, even as he turned the machine through a thinner part of one of Sam Greenaugh’s hedges to bypass the blocked path. He would make quicker headway on Hall Farm pasture than on the neglected undergrowth of the Glebe lands and it was a race against time, a lesser evil to stay a greater, because he had noticed that as well as the woodland, Sam Greenaugh had stacks of second-crop hay in the corner of the nearest pasture.
Belle ran as fast as she could push her legs; fire was one thing she had a healthy respect for. She had witnessed a village shop fire when she was very small. Indelibly imprinted on her mind was the sudden thrust of fire up the thatched roof and, after flames engulfed the interior, the evacuation of mice and beetles as the stock became too hot for them.
Glebe Farm was the nearest, but when she ran shouting into the long-neglected farmyard all that greeted her was silence. She listened, then shouted again, ‘Is there anyone here?’ A voice answered her from somewhere in the house, a woman’s voice. ‘Come in, come in! What’s the matter?’
The kitchen, Belle found, was still a mass of tea chests and trunks not yet unpacked, and the voice obviously came from a room further on.
‘There’s a fire near Top Spinney, the men need help,’ she called as she hurried through, finding to her surprise a tall, very dignified-looking woman holding what looked like court or conference, There were samples of paints and materials spread on a table, and she stood, leaning gently, her long thin fingers spread over the colours and chintz squares. Belle thought her pose graceful and her dark, almost damson-black eyes told of a keen intelligence. Her tallness suggested she must be Cato’s mother. She had an air of controlled dignity which commanded respect, and the attitudes of the three men listening to her dictates were suitably attentive.
