by Evie Grace
‘Oh Rose, you are quite right about living within your means. Have you any money at all?’
‘We have a few shillings,’ she said. ‘Enough to buy bread.’
‘That should tide you over until your brother is paid his wages. You will find work during the summer, so make hay while the sun shines because it’s harder to come by in the winter months.’
‘You have saved our lives,’ Rose said. ‘I’ll never be able to thank you enough.’
Mrs Carter smiled. ‘Old Pa Carter – Stephen’s father – used to grow fruit and veg on the ground here. It needs some digging over and a few barrows of well-rotted horse manure added to it. There’s plenty in the heap at the farm – you can get Donald to fetch it. I’ll let you have some of the seeds I kept from last year to sow, and one of the men will bring you a few pullets from the market in Faversham. When they’re ready, we can let you have a piglet to fatten.’
‘I’d like that. We didn’t have a pig or hens in Canterbury.’
‘You can use the whole pig, except for the squeak. It’s very economical to keep if you feed him on scraps and acorns. What else can I say? Oh, there is firewood – you can clear the old trees in the corner. Don’t go taking logs from the woods – they aren’t yours to burn. Check the chimney isn’t blocked before you light a fire – I expect it’ll need sweeping by now.’
Rose returned to the farm with her grandmother, who handed her a basket of basic provisions and two jars of jam. Donald was allowed to leave his duties in the yard to wheel Minnie and their belongings, along with a broom and some cleaning materials, in the barrow to the cottage.
‘When shall I come back, Mrs Carter?’ Donald asked.
‘My husband expects you at six in the morning. Rose, I can find plenty of chores for you in the house in return for remuneration in kind.’
‘We’re really very grateful,’ Rose said. ‘We’ll see you tomorrow.’
They spent the rest of the day making Toad’s Bottom cottage their own. They had a table, a bench and a fireplace with a stove downstairs, and a mattress, double bedstead and chest upstairs. Rose put the photograph of the family on the mantelpiece, then looked out of the window and saw Donald solving the problem with the gate by taking it off its remaining hinge and leaning it against the wall to one side.
‘That will have to be put back on,’ she called as she ran down to join him. ‘The hens will escape.’
‘Hens?’
‘Yes, we will have hens. And a goat, perhaps. And a great fat pig. Oh, this will be the making of us,’ she said, laughing for the first time in a long while. ‘If we work hard, and scrimp and save, we’ll be set up for life.’
‘There’s a long way to go,’ Donald said. ‘Don’t get your hopes up – it all seems too good to be true.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’
‘You are looking through a rose-tinted lorgnette, Lady Rose,’ Donald teased.
Rose made a pirouette, coming to an abrupt stop and almost overbalancing as her shoe got stuck in the mud in the streamlet alongside the fallen wall.
‘Oh, what a godforsaken place!’ she exclaimed, leaving her shoe behind.
‘You’ve changed your tune.’ Donald grinned as he leaned down and picked it up from the mud.
‘I can’t wear that now.’
‘You’ll have to hop back to the house then. Here.’ Donald held out his arm and helped her to the doorstep. ‘I’ll find some newspaper to dry your shoe overnight, just like Pa used to. I wish he was here, and Ma, and Arthur.’
‘We all do,’ Rose said, biting her lip. ‘Come on. Let’s keep busy. We need firewood, flint and kindling. And water.’ She set her brother to do the sweeping while she dusted the cobwebs and washed the windows. She and Donald turned the mattress on the double bedstead and found an old blanket in the cupboard over the stairs.
There was no coal cellar as there had been at Willow Place. The rusty door latches had small plates fitted over the keyholes to keep out the dirt and there was an old muslin nailed across the front window to stop the soot obscuring the light. There were ants, beetles and spiders, marching up through the gaps between the floorboards upstairs, dangling down from the ceilings and scuttling across the walls. The timbers were half eaten by woodworm and rot, but Rose refused to let anything dampen her spirits.
‘First things first. Mrs Carter said the chimney is likely to be blocked.’ Rose remembered how Pa had had the chimneys swept every year. She was afraid of the smoke if they should light their fire, having had a fear of coughs since Pa’s demise. ‘We can use the broom handle.’
‘It won’t be long enough,’ Donald said.
‘We’ll tie a stick to the end. That should do it.’
After a while, Donald managed to clear the chimney, the soots, feathers and twigs falling down and spilling across the floor. Rose sighed. They would have to start cleaning all over again, but who cared when they were free of the Kingsleys and Minnie had a chance of walking? That was all that mattered.
Chapter Fifteen
Work for Idle Hands
Within two weeks, Minnie was suffering from a lack of fresh air and activity, confined to the cottage with her plastered leg and some sewing that their grandmother had given her to do. Donald was hungry and exhausted from working on the farm, unused to such heavy physical labour, while Rose was struggling with taking on the role of a parent to the twins and looking after a rather recalcitrant house. She had never known anything like it.
When it rained, they had to put a metal bucket which they’d found in the garden to catch the drips in the bedroom, and fight a constant battle with the creepy crawlies that seemed determined to gain entrance. During a dry spell, the front door would shrink and not shut properly.
On their third Sunday in Overshill, Rose closed the downstairs window and looked down at her brother snoring lightly on the spare horsehair mattress which Mrs Carter had brought round on a cart a few days before. Smiling ruefully, she wished she could be more like him, lying there without a care in the world, but it would be different later when he realised how little they had in the way of food.
Donald had been paid, but only two shillings on account of his lack of experience and stamina, and even though Rose had been frugal, they had just three eggs, half a loaf of bread, ham, lemonade, beer and the remains of a pot of jam left. There wasn’t much keeping the wolf from the door, but Rose didn’t like to ask Mrs Carter for more because she didn’t want to cause trouble between her and Mr Carter.
She woke Donald and told him to wash behind his ears and change into his Sunday best.
‘I don’t see why we have to go to church,’ he grumbled. ‘We haven’t got Ma and Pa breathing down our necks now.’ A shadow of regret crossed his eyes. He didn’t mean to be grumpy, she thought. He was having a hard time dealing with the loss of their parents too. He just showed his grief in a different way.
‘I want to demonstrate that we’re respectable members of the community. People are suspicious of us.’
‘Rose, you don’t have to keep up appearances like Aunt Temperance.’
‘We’re going to say our prayers. We will thank the Lord for our good fortune in finding a place to stay.’
‘What about Minnie?’
‘She’ll stay here. I don’t want everyone gawping at her because of her leg, and anyway Mr Carter has said she mustn’t leave the house until it’s mended.’
Leaving Minnie to sit in a chair looking out on the birds in the garden, Rose and Donald went to church for the first time in a long while. They walked up the steps into the churchyard, past the yews and gravestones, before entering the building through the dark oak door and shuffling into the row of seats right at the back of the Church of Our Lady, behind the pews. Rose knelt to pray for the souls of her parents, for Arthur and Tabby, and for the Carters for taking them in, but as she whispered her final amen, she became aware of the gossips murmuring behind their backs.
‘I ’aven’t sin t
hem around here before.’
‘They say they’re Mrs Carter’s long-lost grandchildren from Canterbury, but I don’t know how that can be.’
‘In this village, you are never more than a foot from a Carter,’ somebody else said. ‘There are even more of them now – not Carters by name – but their flesh and blood all the same.’
‘They turned up on the doorstep of Wanstall Farm.’
‘The sister is crippled, so I hear.’
‘I don’t think we’ll ever know the half of it.’
‘It’s a shame. They’ve been given the cottage at Toad’s Bottom when there are local people who’ve had their eye on that.’
‘It’s falling down, has been for years. You’d have thought they’d have put them up in the farmhouse. Old Carter isn’t short of a shillin’ or two.’
‘It’s a terrible thing to be orphaned at any age. Is there no other family?’
Trying to ignore them, Rose looked up at the stone pillars and soaring arches above her head. The stone bosses where the ribs met caught her eye. There was a nun’s face, a rose and a green man with a beard of leaves and a kindly expression that made her feel a little better. She wished they were back at St Mildred’s, where they were always welcome. Here in Overshill, she was painfully aware that they were outsiders.
The organist began to play from behind a carved wooden screen, and the vicar – an elderly gentleman with his grey hair brushed forward on to his forehead and cheeks – stepped up to the lectern in his cassock, surplice and stole.
As the service went on, Rose felt the weight of Donald’s head gradually pressing on her shoulder, surprised that the growling of her empty belly didn’t wake him. She was starving, and it didn’t help that the vicar, who had an unfortunate lisp and a tendency to stumble over his words, had decided to dwell on the parable of the Great Banquet.
Eventually, the service came to an end, and they returned to the cottage.
‘What shall we do now?’ Rose looked at the sorry state of the garden, comparing it with the ones they’d seen on the way back from church. If only they had their own fruit trees and a vegetable patch, instead of a half-cleared expanse of mud and brambles. She and Donald had been taking turns to dig over the soil, turning up the stones and flints and tossing them aside, but it would be a while before they could plant anything.
‘We could take Minnie out in the barrer,’ Donald said.
Rose didn’t argue. If they kept busy, they wouldn’t have their minds on their empty stomachs. She went indoors and changed out of her Sunday best into a hessian skirt and cotton blouse.
‘Where are we going?’ Minnie asked when Rose joined her downstairs and Donald told her of their plan for the afternoon.
‘Do you remember how Ma used to take us on nature walks when we were younger? I thought we’d go and explore the countryside around Overshill.’ Donald helped his sister off the mattress. Rose handed over her shawl and stick, a lump in her throat as she remembered long walks through the water meadows where the cattle grazed beside the Stour, and how Ma would show them the water voles and damselflies among the yellow flag iris.
‘There’s no need for us to go out and look for insects – I’ve seen them all this morning: ants; greenbottles; spiders. Ugh.’ Minnie grimaced.
Rose smiled again. ‘Do you remember how we had to find bugs and look at them with the magnifying glass, and how Donald got stung on the nose by a wopsie?’
‘It wasn’t funny,’ he said.
‘Oh, it was,’ she countered as they walked outside to the barrow which they’d left under the window. ‘Your nose swelled up until you looked like Mr Kingsley coming back from the tavern.’
Rose took Minnie by her arms and Donald lifted her legs to get her into the barrow, where she perched on some straw with a pillow under her plaster cast.
‘We should take some wittles,’ Donald said.
‘I wish you’d speak properly,’ Rose scolded. ‘You’re becoming quite the country boy.’
‘Boy?’ he spluttered.
‘Man, I mean,’ she said, realising she had hurt his pride. ‘I’ll see what we’ve got.’ She found the bottle of lemonade, some bread and a little ham which she had to cut the fat from because it had gone over and smelled bad. There was precious little left for their supper. She packed the provisions into a basket, carried it outside and gave it to Minnie to look after, before letting Donald take charge of the barrow.
‘Ouch,’ Minnie cried out as they set off.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to stay here?’ Rose said.
‘There’s no way I’m letting you go off again without me. Waiting for your leg to mend is very dull.’
A dog trotted past, the look on its face reminding Rose of Arthur’s expression when he’d been on his way to call on his sweetheart. She wouldn’t dwell on his absence, she resolved, following Donald into the woods where the woodcutters’ saws had fallen silent for the Sabbath. At least she, Donald and Minnie had each other.
‘It’s very bumpy,’ Minnie said through gritted teeth as they made their way along a path between the chestnut trees with their glossy leaves and spiky green fruits.
‘This isn’t wise,’ Rose fretted. ‘Mr Carter was most insistent that Minnie should rest. All this bouncing about will break her bones again.’
‘She’ll be all right,’ Donald said. ‘Anyway, it isn’t far.’
A while later, they were still walking and Rose began to feel light-headed.
‘Donald, this feels more like a wild goose chase than a nature walk to me.’
‘It’s further than I thought, but don’t worry, my dear sisters. We’ll be there soon.’ Donald pushed and pulled the barrow to force it out of a rut, then turned along the narrow lane that ran through the top of the village. At the same time, a man on horseback rode towards them, moving to one side to let them pass.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Rose said, frowning at her brother for his lack of manners.
‘That looks like hard work,’ the man observed, bringing his big grey horse to a halt.
Rose found her eyes drawn to him, a young man in his late twenties or early thirties with clean-cut features and a square jaw, who spoke with an unfamiliar, exotic accent. He doffed his hat, revealing a mop of honey-blond hair.
‘I wonder if you can help me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know this area well, and I’m looking for the road that takes me back to Selling.’
‘You’re heading in the right direction,’ Rose said. ‘Keep going until you reach a crossroads and turn right so that you’re heading north.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I wish you all a good day.’ Kicking his horse forward, he passed them at some speed, his mount shying away from the barrow and propelling him out of the saddle and up its neck.
‘Who was that?’ Minnie asked as the rider regained his seat and the horse’s hooves clattered away down the lane.
‘I don’t know,’ Rose said, turning to face her sister once she’d seen the stranger disappear safely around the corner at the bottom of the hill. ‘Have you seen him around here before, Donald?’
Donald shook his head as he stopped in a gateway.
‘I thought he looked rather handsome,’ Minnie said.
‘I didn’t notice,’ Rose said, blushing.
‘You’re fibbing,’ Minnie laughed. ‘You couldn’t keep your eyes off him.’
‘I wanted to make sure he didn’t part company from his horse. I thought he was going to fall off,’ Rose protested.
‘Oh, do stop jabbering and open the gate,’ Donald said impatiently.
Rose reached out for the rusting iron catch, but it didn’t feel right.
‘Whose land is this?’ she asked.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’
‘I think we might be trespassing.’
‘The man who owns the estate is dead, and the house is empty. There’s a couple of old servants living in the lodge beside the stables, that’s all, and I reckon they’re half blind and deaf. I�
��ve already seen how the land lies.’
‘Are you sure?’ Rose said doubtfully.
‘Trust me,’ Donald said.
She lifted the catch and pushed the rickety gate open, sending a flock of sparrows flying out from the hazels and making her jump out of her skin.
Donald laughed, and shoved the barrow into the field.
‘We can’t be seen from the house. I’ve been this way before. Sam showed me – he knows everything there is to know about living in the country.’
A lark sang from the clear blue sky above their heads and Rose began to relax a little.
Donald turned the barrow around and let it start to run down the hill and pick up speed. He ran alongside while Minnie screamed in protest, but gradually the barrow slowed to a stop where the ground levelled out at the bottom of the slope. Donald pushed it through a gap in the bushes and lowered it down a small drop on to a pebbled beach next to a stream where they were hidden by the blackthorn and brambles.
‘You see, you made it in one piece.’ His eyes twinkled with amusement as he turned Minnie to face the water. ‘And we’re quite safe from prying eyes,’ he added, glancing at Rose as he stripped off his shirt and kicked off his shoes.
‘You aren’t going in the water? No, I forbid it,’ she said, noticing how his ribs were visible and his calves were skin and bone, a stark reminder of their predicament.
‘You can’t stop me. Pa larn’d me how to swim.’
Ma had instilled a fear of water in her – her mother had seen Pa rescue Arthur from the River Stour as a small boy when he had almost drowned. Pa had taught Donald to swim, but not the girls.
‘It really isn’t wise.’
‘It’s only up to your waist at its deepest. Come on, Rose. I’m going to show you how to tickle trout.’
‘I’d like to go for a paddle,’ Minnie said.
‘Well, you can’t – you know what Mr Carter said about getting your plaster wet.’
