A Dangerous Undertaking

by Mary Nichols

  He lay beside her, his arm beneath her shoulders, staring up at the ornate ceiling, wondering if he would ever be forgiven for what he had done. He had taken her because he loved her and wanted her, but in doing so he had thrown her life away, selfishly sacrificed her to the curse. She had said they made their own luck. But how? How could he change it? Should he tell her? He turned his head to look at her. She had fallen asleep, her hair tumbled about on the pillows and a faint smile on her lips, as if she was dreaming of the pleasure she had just enjoyed. Or of more to come? How could he make love to her again? But how could he not, without breaking her heart and his own along with it?

  He slowly withdrew his arm and carefully left the bed without waking her. He dressed silently and went downstairs, picked up his gun and called to his dog. The best place for him, until he could pull himself together, was out in the open, among the village men, working on the dyke. Taking a turn with a shovel might help to release the terrible tension within him.

  In the middle of February the thaw set in, and Roland’s work on the new drain was put to the test.

  ‘It’s holding,’ he told Margaret one day, coming back to the house at ten o’clock for his breakfast; he could not break a lifetime habit of rising early and going out with his fast unbroken. ‘Though the levels of the cut are two feet above normal.’

  ‘What about Great-Uncle Henry? His house is very low-lying.’

  ‘What about him?’ He did not like her reminding him of the man. ‘I have seen nothing of him these last two weeks. No doubt he has left and taken his fine friends with him.’

  ‘And the villagers?’

  ‘All high and dry. Would you like to come with me and see?’

  It was the first time he had asked her if she would like to accompany him, and she gladly accepted, hoping that with the melting snow would come a thawing in their relationship. She had hoped it might improve as a result of their lovemaking, but she had been doomed to disappointment. Nothing had changed, except that perhaps he was even more remote, even more troubled. She had tried to ask him what was wrong, but he had denied that anything was bothering him beyond the usual business of the village and his duties as a Justice of the Peace. She could not reach him and could only pray that whatever it was would pass and he would come to her again.

  As soon as they had eaten their fill of boiled ham, coddled eggs and oatmeal porridge, she hurried to put on fur-lined boots, cloak and muff, and rejoined him at the front door. He took her arm and they set off on foot through the village towards the flood-defences on the other side.

  Margaret was surprised and delighted to see that several of the village houses had new thatch, and on others the walls were being repaired. ‘Oh, how glad I am to see you are a man of your word,’ she said.

  ‘Did you think I was not?’ he asked mildly.

  ‘No, I knew you were.’

  He did not answer. He had broken a far more important promise to her, and the guilt would not go away. It was made worse because she was so obviously trying to please him, to make a success of their marriage, to interest herself in things that concerned him, to give him a loving home to come home to after a day in the village or on the fen. In everything she did, she showed over and over again that she loved him and had forgotten that impossible pledge he had made to release her at the end of a year. He could no more release her now than hold back the dawn of each day, drawing the year inexorably onward. He forced himself to smile at her as she spoke cheerfully to the villagers, who had come to know and like her.

  ‘What are those bricks made of?’ she asked, pointing to a pile of greyish-brown blocks.

  ‘Clay lumps,’ he said. ‘Come. I’ll show you how they are made.’

  He took her to a yard at the end of the village street where a group of men were busy mixing clay, chopped straw and cow-dung in a trough and puddling it into a dough with bare feet. She grimaced and he laughed. ‘It makes capital bricks. When the mix is just right, they cut it into slabs and dry them out.’

  ‘Can they withstand the weather?’

  ‘Very well. The completed walls are washed over with diluted chalk and salt and then given a colour-wash. They last for years.’

  She watched while Roland had a word or two with the men, then they continued on out of the village to arrive on its western side where the new drain had been cut and the displaced earth formed into a six-foot barrier along the bank. He took her hand and helped her to scramble up the slope so they could see down into the water. It raced along in a torrent, taking with it lumps of ice and broken branches, bearing them away towards the river and leaving the village dry, though some of the outlying fields had been inundated. Margaret smiled to see the men walking over this flooded land on stilts, herding the cattle to higher ground, as well-balanced as if they had been on their feet. The strange windmills were busy scooping the water into their buckets and tipping it into the dykes which bordered the field. Beyond them, clumps of blackened reeds stood twisted and drooping, half in and half out of the water; willows and alders, tracing the line of the cut, stood starkly against a strangely luminous sky. ‘Where has all the water come from?’ she asked. ‘Surely it is not all melted snow?’

  ‘Yes, but it has come from hills many miles to the west, brought down the rivers and canals to the fens. Before they were drained, all this——’ his hand swept the acres of sodden fields, ‘—would have been under water. Now it only happens in severe winters, and then only if we are not prepared.’

  ‘As you were.’

  ‘As we were. There was some flooding, but nothing dramatic.’

  ‘Where does it all go?’

  ‘To the sea, eventually.’ He pointed in the direction of Highmere Sluice. ‘The sluice is opened and away it goes.’ He paused, noticing her shiver. ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘No, not at all.’ Not for a minute would she have confessed that her toes were numb; she wanted to savour this intimacy, the shared interest in the welfare of the village, their togetherness.

  ‘Would you like to go out to the fen? Then I could really show you some water.’ He smiled and added, ‘I promise you won’t have to row.’

  ‘I should like that very much.’

  He led her down the bank at the end of the new dyke and helped her into a small boat which was moored there. He was cheerful, almost boyish, as he picked up a quanting-pole and propelled them along the cut and out on to the permanent water of the fen.

  Here all signs of civilisation vanished. They glided along through the rustling reeds, the only sounds the lapping of the water against the sides of the boat and the croaking of frogs. Roland pulled the craft in to a patch of reeds, shipped the quanting-pole and, leaning over the side, began pulling at a narrow osier basket which was anchored just below the surface. It had no bottom but a huge net, and in the net were hundreds of squirming eels. Involuntarily she shrank from it.

  ‘Don’t you like eels?’ he queried, dropping the net back into the water.

  ‘Not live ones, though Mama used to cook eel pie when we lived in London. She bought them from the market.’

  He smiled. ‘They are still alive when they reach London, Margaret. They wouldn’t remain fresh otherwise. They are sent to London in barrels of water, which is changed at every stop when the horses are changed. Your mother would have known that.’

  ‘Yes, she would, wouldn’t she?’ It was pleasant to be talking to him about her mother in such a calm way, but then, it was not Roland but his grandmother who could not bear the mention of her. ‘There is so much about her I didn’t know. I could not understand her love for her home, which I had always thought of as bleak and unfriendly, but it isn’t, is it?’

  ‘You either love it or you hate it,’ he said. ‘There is no middle road.’

  ‘Then I love it,’ she said, warmed by his smile which seemed to be reaching out to her, drawing her to him. ‘I want to learn all I can.’

  ‘Then where shall we start?’ he asked. ‘With the way the men earn a living?’r />
  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Farming, of course, because this is some of the most fertile land in the country, but they supplement their living on the fen as their forefathers did, long before the fens were drained. Fish and fowl and reeds for thatching. Eels are not the only delicacy from the fens to find their way to the tables of London,’ he said. ‘Ducks are sent too, sometimes thousands at a time. They are enticed into netted enclosures by tame decoys.’

  She laughed. ‘You are teasing me.’

  ‘No, on my oath. The tame ducks know there is an abundance of food in the enclosures because the duck-hunters scatter it there. They lead the other birds to it. When the net is drawn in, the tame ducks are identified and set free to entice more wild birds back to the nets. They do not know their fellows have ended up on dinner-tables.’

  Suddenly, as if to prove his point, the sky was filled with a great cloud of wildfowl, flying in arrowhead formation, low and silent, except for the beating of their wings. As she watched, they dived down towards a distant reed-bed, quarking and squabbling. ‘They do not know they will never fly again,’ she said wistfully, and could not suppress a shudder of apprehension. Had she been enticed into a trap? Would she ever be free again? Did she even want to be?

  ‘You are cold?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘It is time we returned,’ he said, looking up at the sky. In the past half-hour it had filled up with huge black clouds, tier upon tier, whipped up by the wind which tore across the open space.

  ‘Will it rain?’ she asked.

  ‘Perhaps.’ He picked up the pole and in no time, it seemed to Margaret, they were back on dry land, but by this time she was very cold indeed and could not stop shivering. ‘I am sorry I should not have taken you out,’ he said. ‘You are not used to this raw weather. If you catch a chill…’

  She smiled through chattering teeth. ‘If I can escape a chill after going through the ice, a little cold air won’t hurt me.’

  ‘We will not take the risk.’ Suddenly he was the distant Lord Pargeter again, not the laughing boyish Roland in whose company she had just spent two delightful but chilly hours. ‘Why did you not tell me? We could have come back long ago.’ He took her arm and hurried her towards the blacksmith’s shop where he knew it would be warm.

  ‘I was so interested, I hardly noticed how cold I was,’ she said, following him into the smithy. ‘Please don’t worry.’

  The blacksmith’s name was Silas Gotobed. He was a huge man, with long dark hair which fell loosely about his broad shoulders. His features were craggy from being alternately in great heat and cold winds, but his eyes were intelligent and friendly. He dusted down a stool and set it close to the fire. ‘Sit awhile, my lady,’ he said. ‘The wind is lazy today, but it will blow the clouds away. I doubt it will rain.’

  She laughed. ‘Lazy?’

  ‘It cannot take the trouble to go round you,’ Roland said with a smile. ‘So it blows right through you.’

  ‘Oh, I know exactly what you mean.’ She sat down and stretched out her cold toes to the warmth, while the blacksmith continued to fashion a piece of red-hot metal. ‘What are you making?’

  ‘A weathervane, my lady. The one on the Manor has fallen down.’ He held it up to show her. It was a witch riding on a broomstick. ‘She always rides with the wind, do you see? Her cloak is flying out behind her.’

  Margaret turned to Roland, who was standing at the doorway surveying the sky, as if searching for something in the shapes of the clouds. ‘Why a witch, Roland?’

  ‘Why not? There has been a witch on the gable-end of the Manor these last hundred years. It keeps her associates away. They are afraid of iron.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘And who am I to deny the beliefs of my forebears?’

  ‘So they are perpetuated.’ She was annoyed with him, but she was unsure why. Did he really believe such nonsense? ‘If you are going to be superstitious about it, you could say that her being blown down was a sign that witches have lost their potency and she should not be replaced.’

  ‘Would to God you were right,’ he said morosely, and turned to face her. ‘Come, Silas is right; it’s too windy to rain.’

  She rose and followed him out into the road, where the gale whipped her skirts against her legs and took her breath away. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, miserable because the friendly intimacy they had shared on the fen had disappeared with their return to habitation. Perhaps he was really only happy on the water. ‘Are you afraid of something?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ he snapped.

  ‘But you are. You are afraid of some fairy-tale nonsense. Oh, Roland, how could you?’

  He did not answer, but took her arm and propelled her forward, so that it took all her energy to keep up with him and she certainly had no more breath for speech. As soon as he had seen her safely indoors, he turned on his heel and went out again.

  He could not bear to stay with her, to see the reproach in her eyes, to know there were questions on her tongue he did not dare to answer. He loved her and had by his selfish actions condemned her to the fate he had been so careful to avoid for Susan. And thinking of Susan and her expectations, even if those had not been put into words, made his wretchedness worse. He picked up his gun, powder and shot, called to his dog and hurried down the lawn, squelching through the melted snow towards the boat-house. Out on the loneliness of the fen was where he wanted to be, somewhere he could contemplate without those kitten eyes watching him, accusing him. He untied the boat, jumped in and pushed off. He would get up a sweat and bag a few ducks, which was what he had intended in the first place before his impulsive invitation to Margaret to join him, and maybe he would feel better after that.

  He rowed down the cut towards the river, passing Sedge House on the way. That building was the symbol of his misery; he wished it would fall into the water, as it had been threatening to do for years. He glanced towards it as he rowed. The flood-water had reached the back door, though he doubted it would go higher. Anyone in the upper rooms would be perfectly safe and he need not trouble his conscience about them. He caught a glimpse of someone moving across one of the bedroom windows; so the old fellow had not gone after all. More fool him! He thought he saw a man at another window, a tall, thin man with long golden hair. He paused in his rowing and cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, ‘Master Capitain! Do you need assistance?’

  The window was flung open and Henry’s head appeared. ‘None, an’ if I did I’d not seek it of a Pargeter.’

  Other heads appeared at other windows, Roland noticed. ‘Would you all drown first?’

  ‘We will not drown, have no fear of that. If we are threatened, I shall know what to do.’

  ‘Your skiff is not big enough to take you all. I see three or four of you.’

  ‘Then your eyes deceive you. An’ I was not thinking of running away. If you think to save your fields by overfilling the river, then I give you fair warning; if the water-level rises by so much as an inch more, your new bank will come down.’

  ‘And do you expect the people of Winterford to stand by and let you do it? You are a fool, Henry Capitain, if you believe that. I have the right of it.’

  Henry was about to retort, when someone tugged at him from behind. ‘Desist, Henry, desist.’ He said other things that Roland could not hear, but the result was that Henry’s head disappeared and the window was banged shut. Roland picked up his oars and rowed on.

  The encounter with Henry Capitain did not make him feel any better about Margaret; nothing did, nothing could, not even a few hours spent on the fen with no company but a dog and a fowling-piece. The eerie silence, broken only by the croaking of frogs, the beating wings of ducks as they flew overhead and the light splash of his oars, served only to amplify his thoughts until it seemed he was shouting them aloud. He was cursed and he did not know how to break out of it. If he died… If he fled far away… If he confessed… The dog looked at him in surprise; there were ducks in plenty and not once had his master f
ired. He wagged his tail to encourage him but all that happened was that a tired hand was laid on his head. ‘Good dog, I’m not pleasant company today, am I? Best be getting home before they send a search-party out looking for us.’ There was nothing to be done but watch and wait and protect Margaret with every ounce of his will and strength. From now on, he promised himself, he would try to be a loving husband, try to pretend nothing was wrong, for her sake. He picked up his oars and rowed home, without firing a single shot.

  Spring arrived at last. Swords of bright green pushed their way up out of the muddy water; blackened sedge was replaced by new green shoots. The alder sent forth fronds of pale lime and golden catkins dangled on the willow. Daffodils bloomed on the lawns of the Manor and snowdrops and yellow aconites carpeted the woods. The winter wheat was inches high, and the men were out on the open strips, sowing barley. They plodded rhythmically up one furrow and down the next, each pace exactly the length of the one before, each handful of seed covering exactly the same area. Behind them a small boy with a harrow covered the seed, and small children danced and shouted and clapped their hands to scare away the birds which flocked about them, daring to swoop on the banquet after the winter shortage. The sky was a light blue and there was more warmth in the sun. Everything seemed to be alight with new life, and Margaret felt it flowing through her, giving her a zest and energy that nothing seemed to suppress. She had put on a little weight and her hair, worn in ringlets and unpowdered, shone with health. Her cheeks glowed and her eyes sparkled. A quarter of her year at Winterford had gone and, but for one thing, she would have said she had never been happier. Roland had said nothing about what would happen at the year’s end, had not said he wanted her to stay. And surely, now that they were husband and wife in reality as well as name, he did not still expect her to leave? But she was too afraid of what he might say to mention it herself.