She had never expected to laugh this day, and now she didn’t know whether she was laughing or crying, but her body was shaking, as was Barney’s, and the tears were rolling down her cheeks, and now handing the almost empty bowl to Barney, she rose to her feet, saying, ‘Oh, Mary, Mary.’ Then looking down at her husband, she added, ‘Go on. Go on, or else we’ll be having the mister in to find out what all the nuration’s about.’
Still laughing, Barney patted her arm; then as he was leaving the kitchen he glanced at Mary, saying, ‘You’re a case. You know that, Mary Petty? You’re a case.’
As soon as the door closed on Barney, Mary turned and, giving her full attention to Emma, she said firmly, ‘Fun and jokes apart, get yourself upstairs and put your feet on the bed, for if I know anything you’re going to have a visitor sooner than you expect. It’s in your face.’
And Mary was right, the visitor came two days later after hours of agonising pain and straining, during which at times Emma longed for death. Even when her daughter was put into her arms she felt too weak, too tired to hold her. For some time she was only dimly aware of Mary hovering over her and of the doctor talking about the difficulty of the afterbirth; then of someone holding a cup to her mouth and making her drink something, and she recognised what it was, for she had given her granny doses of laudanum to ease the cramp.
At one period she imagined the parson was in the room and bending above her and she put her hand up and touched his face; and then she went to sleep, and slept on and off for the next two days.
Two
She was a fortnight in bed, and she was surprised to learn that she had nearly died. Mary had informed her there had been complications after the baby had come and that she was lucky to be in the land of the living.
She didn’t fully realise how ill she had been until she attempted to walk, when she felt weak and had a job to put one foot in front of the other. She couldn’t imagine that she had ever run and sometimes, when no-one was looking, jumped the stile.
Barney assured her that her strength would return. He was very gentle with her, tender, and so proud of his daughter. There was an ache in her heart when she watched him holding the child, yet at the same time she felt comforted in the knowledge that she had given him something, repaid him in a way for his kindness to her. She marvelled at his kindness and consideration. He was so unlike the rest of his family that it would seem there was no blood connection between them. He showed none of his mother’s characteristics and little of his father’s, except that, like the mister, he was a good worker.
They had been snowed up for a fortnight, and afterwards the roads had run with slush and rain, and so the child was almost two months old before it was christened. Henry held it in his arms and named it Annie Yorkless. Barney had wanted the name Annie because he said he remembered his grandmother with fondness. When Henry placed the child back in Emma’s arms, their hands had overlapped for a moment, and it was a moment of which they were both aware.
When, later at the church door, Henry looked at her he said with conventional politeness, ‘May she be of comfort to you both.’ But it was Barney who answered, saying, ‘I’m sure she will be, Parson, I’m sure of that. And seein’ who her mother is she couldn’t be else.’ He had cast a warm glance towards Emma, but she was looking down on the child, wrapping her up and covering her face against the bitter winds, thinking as she did so that she should be proud of Barney because he always acted with courtesy, he always knew what to say, not like some of the farmers’ sons who were as gauche as the meanest of their hired hands.
On the drive back, Barney said to her, ‘He’s a nice chap that parson. We’re lucky to have such. Not many would have tramped out here every day for a week as he did when you were so bad. And you know what?’ He turned and grinned at her. ‘You patted him on the cheek one day and called him Henry. I thought I would have died, I thought I would have died meself. But he didn’t take it as a liberty as old Crabtree would have done. Oh, you had to know your place with old Crabtree. But he held your hand and soothed you, he was full of concern. He’s a good man, no matter what they say about him in the village. The fact is he’s too straight for them, gets under their skins, the hypocrites. But that’s what they’re calling him now. They say he had a hand in emptying the cellar all those years back ’cos he was against the drink, but that now he’s doing it on the sly himself. That’s what they’re saying. Willowy Wilkinson put that around. ’Twas after he brought the young lady to see the vicarage, the one that he was going to marry. Huh!’ He laughed now. ‘Wilkinson had had her eye on him, a good-looking young fellow like that and a gentleman into the bargain. She should have had sense to know that young parsons come from the class, and they marry the same. They may be poor but it makes no difference, they don’t stoop. If they did ’twould never work. Something in the calibre. You get it in animals, horses particularly. Something you can’t put your finger on except in the voices. Like the painter.’ He turned and grinned at her. ‘He even swears differently, doesn’t he, the painter?’
She looked at him with fondness. She liked to hear him talk. He talked a lot, especially in bed. Sometimes she went to sleep listening to him talking and he laughed at her the next morning, saying, ‘I sent you off again.’ But there was always a lot of sense in what Barney said, especially in the fact that the class didn’t stoop. Yet at the same time this fact caused a form of irritation for she knew for instance that Barney had a better thinking mind than some of the folks round about who considered themselves near gentry. These were the ones that joined the hunt after the fox, these were the ones who had two to three hundred acres of land.
‘The painter fellow’s a funny bloke, isn’t he? I had a crack with him yesterday. I was in the lower field and he was on the road coming back from Newcastle. That’s where he said he had been, and he was three sheets in the wind. He had come back on the carrier cart and had walked from the village. Must have been paying his monthly visits. Cheaper than keeping a wife, eh?’ He turned and laughed at her, his mouth wide, his eyes portraying the familiarity that existed between husband and wife. But when he saw there was no answering gleam of amusement in her expression, his voice more sober now, he added, ‘Well, ’tis only natural. And he’s never touched on the village lasses. Not that there’s much to choose from there, I’d say, if you go by looks. But then again—’ Once more there was a note of amusement in his voice as he ended, ‘looks ain’t the question in this matter, shut your eyes and hope for the best as they say.’
‘Barney!’
‘Oh, all right.’ He pulled a face at her, then grinned as he added, ‘You sounded like Miss Wilkinson there in Sunday school. It’s gone down, the Sunday school, they tell me. Now if you were to take it up, by! they would get stuck in the doorway.’
And so it went on, and she listened to his bantering knowing that he was happy. With the exception of one cloud on his horizon, his sky was clear and full of promise. And the cloud was the man in whose veins his own blood ran.
It was on the day that she first took the child down to the painter’s that she met up with James Fordyke. She had not come face to face with him since the time of the cholera, and now there he was riding his horse across the corner of the field of ripening barley. She had the child in her arms or she would have taken to her heels and run, but what she did do was to shout, ‘See what you’re doing!’ She called at the top of her voice, and it was loud enough for him to check the horse and look in her direction. He now brought the animal round and, instead of taking it to the edge of the field, he brought it straight across towards her, and she stood gasping for breath as she watched the animal treading down the growing shoots. They’d had two hard winters, they’d lost sheep and lambs, the milk yield was down, moreover, so was pig flesh in the open market, and you couldn’t get more than one and sixpence for a fully dressed hen. Yet in the weekly paper she had read yesterday that the hungry forties were over and a golden era was dawning for the industrial area which included
the Tyneside, and this might stop people rushing off to the gold diggings in California, and that the Bank of England had a lot of money in it and so interest rates would lessen; also that the working man was happy and contented now that the loaf had been reduced to sevenpence. The rest of the world had gone mad with revolutions and things but England under good Queen Victoria was a haven of peace and an example to the world.
Well, her private comment on this had been, they must have missed their part of Tyneside for there had been talk of doing away with Billy Proctor’s services. But she had stood out against this and said that, as the cottage was hers, if they dismissed him she’d put him in there. So determined had been her attitude that Jake Yorkless had passed over the idea.
But this five acre field and the ten acre beyond had been cropped for the first time. They had worked on the land for two or three years previously, clearing it of stones and tilling it, then leaving it fallow to the frost to cleanse it, and the result had been this promising crop. And there he was mowing it down.
And now he was sitting above her glaring at her.
‘Did you speak to me?’
‘Yes, I did.’ She added to her offence by not saying sir. ‘You’re taking your horse over a clean crop, ’tis against all rules.’
‘Whose rules…who made the rules?’
She paused for a moment, lost for words, her lips rubbing against each other. She lifted the child from her left to her right arm, then said, ‘’Tis a known fact that you don’t cross, don’t take animals over ripe fields. You wouldn’t take it over your own land.’
She saw his hand twitching on his riding crop; then bending towards her, he growled, ‘You forget, madam, that this is my land.’
‘’Tis nothing of the kind.’
‘’Tis nothing of the kind.’ His voice mocked her tone; then his voice in a growl again, he said, ‘I rent this land to Yorkless. If my memory serves me right he owns nothing but thirty acres and he pays yearly rent on fifty. I can recall it tomorrow if I wish, and I just might. Yes, yes’—he straightened in the saddle now and his head moved slowly up and down—‘I just might, young matron, and that will teach you to keep a civil tongue in your head and to learn how to bend your knee and to address your betters when they deign to speak to you. What you need, madam, is a taste of one of your own whips.’
On this, he kicked the horse viciously in the sides, and it plunged away down the perimeter of the field, leaving a churned path in its wake, and she stood for a moment swaying as if she were about to fall. She was even so affected that she went and rested her back against the drystone wall. What would they do if he took the land away? And all through her. He had looked at her as if he hated her, loathed her; and this had all come about because she had afforded a little entertainment for his father-in-law. It was strange the trouble that those whips had brought into her life; and she wondered, were she to burn them now, if their influence would die away. Yet she knew she could never burn them, they belonged to her dada. They were the only things she had that recalled to her that at one time she had a father, and a mother, and that she hadn’t always lived on this farm where peace was an elusive thing. It was there hovering outside herself, sometimes in the form of Barney, sometimes in the form of her child, but always overshadowed by Luke. That was strange. As she saw them now there seemed no difference between her brother-in-law and the master of the Hall. In her mind they merged and formed one person from whom emanated evil …
She was still shaking when she reached the cottage.
‘Is that you, Mary?’ Ralph Bowman called from the inner room, and when she answered, ‘No, ’tis me,’ he appeared in the doorway, his face bright, his smile welcoming, saying, ‘Well, hello stranger…strangers. So this is it, is it?’
As he took the child from her arms he said, ‘What is it? You’re shivering.’
‘I’ve had an encounter with Mr Fordyke.’
She now proceeded to tell him what had happened and when she had finished, he said, ‘He’s got no bloody right to cross sown fields and he knows that. ’Twas a form of aggravation and if it went to the justices that’s what they would say…or should say, but they’re all hand in glove. Yet I don’t know if there’s many would take his part, not even in his own class.’
A few minutes later, sitting opposite to her, a hot drink in his hand, he said, ‘What perhaps you don’t know, Emma, and it just came about in a roundabout way seeping downwards from Miss Noble to Mrs Atkins and through his mightiness the butler, then Pearson the steward and down through the stable-hands et cetera until it reached The Tuns, is that had the old man lived, Sir Peter you know, you were going to be asked up there to be trained as a lady’s maid. Some said it was Mrs Fordyke’s idea and some said it was Miss Noble who suggested it to her because she was getting on, Miss Noble I mean, and she saw you as a bright young lass able to read and write, educated as it were by Henry. Then of course came the cholera and all that was knocked on the head. But that wasn’t the only thing that soured Mr James Fordyke, for the old man had left everything, every penny to his daughter, and tied it up in such a way, and very cleverly too, that only she could touch it. They say it was a very bizarre will: She had a personal allowance and she could draw any money for living expenses but nothing to enhance the house or to reduce the mortgage that was on it or anything appertaining to the upkeep. They say his will was like an act of parliament. The old fellow knew what he was doing and whom he was dealing with, for ’tis known that James Fordyke has gone through two fortunes, whispered in ways best not talked about, so the man you met this morning is a very frustrated human being, Emma, and likely he was taking out of you what he wanted to take out of his wife. But it won’t do him any good to cut off Yorkless’ leased land: the rent can’t be all that much but it’s still something, and what’s sure is he can’t employ men to work it. And another thing that must be an irritant to him, he used to spend most part of his year up in London. He had a place up there they say. Now that is gone and he’s stuck here. Awful life for him. Poor soul!’ He grinned at her; then leaning towards her, he added, ‘Don’t let it worry you. If he tries anything about the land, all you’ve got to do is to go and see Mrs Fordyke. After all, it is she who holds the whip hand there. Talking of whips’—his smile widened now—‘what became of all those whips you had?’
‘They’re still there under the roof.’
‘Henry and I were talking about them the other day. You wouldn’t know how to use them now, would you?’
‘Oh, it would come back; you never lose the knack.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
He looked now to where the child was lying in the corner of the big chair and after a moment he asked, while keeping his eyes on the bundle, ‘Are you happy, Emma?’
Her answer did not come immediately; then it was truthful. ‘In a way,’ she said.
He turned to her and he repeated, ‘In a way?’
She nodded. ‘Barney’s good to me, kind, I couldn’t wish for a kinder, but there’s feeling in the house. ’Tis Luke, he hates me. You can—’ she closed her eyes now and moved her head from side to side—‘well, sort of smell it. The only time I’m free of it is at night. Even then you’re aware he’s across the landing and ’tis as if his eyes are piercing the wall. Sometimes I…I find him standing staring at me and I haven’t known he was there.’
Ralph Bowman looked at the young girl sitting opposite him. She didn’t look like the mother of a child, although she did not any longer appear like a young girl untouched, something outside nature; there was about her now a stronger appeal than that which had lent fascination to the girl, she was a woman with a quality that caught at a man’s breath, all the more so because she was unaware of it. She was still not as yet conscious of her own value. No mirror had reflected her beauty, or if it had her eyes had been closed to it. It pained him to sit here looking at her. Did she know she had altered his life, made him want to go on living because, once dead, he would no longer be able to see her, h
old her in the heart of his eye?…He had an advantage over Henry, because he could gaze on her when she was no longer present. And Luke. Oh yes, he could understand Luke hating her.
He bent towards her now and said quietly, ‘You’ve got to accept, Emma, that people will either love you or hate you. And there’ll be no happy medium where you’re concerned, particularly with men. And they only hate you because they are not able to love you, because there is something in you that has repulsed them, you can see through them, and it comes over in a kind of disdain…’
‘I don’t disdain anybody. ’Tisn’t in me to look down on anybody.’
The Whip (The Spaniard's Gift) Page 23
