The Fleethaven Trilogy

by Margaret Dickinson

  Ella saw a long look pass between the two elderly women. Then Esther nodded and whispered, ‘I know, Beth, I know.’

  Suddenly she seemed to become aware of Ella listening to every word being spoken and she said, quite sharply, ‘Go and ask if you can help yar aunty Rosie, Missy.’

  And as if to take some of the edge from her grandmother’s voice, Beth Eland smiled at Ella and added, ‘She’d be glad of your help, lovey.’

  In the huge farmhouse kitchen, Peggy Godfrey, Mavis and Isobel were already supposedly ‘helping’ Rosie, though only Peggy was buttering rounds of bread to make sandwiches. Isobel stood near the sink lighting a cigarette with fingers that trembled and Mavis was leaning against the dresser, her arms folded around herself, at least as far round as her arms would reach. Mavis was large and comfortable and jolly; except that today, she was not jolly.

  As Ella entered, she felt their gaze all come to rest on her and, in turn, she returned their stares. Peggy dropped the knife she was holding and came round the table to gather Ella into her arms. Ella hugged her in return, comforted by the waft of the flowery perfume Peggy always wore. It reminded her sharply of her home, for it was the scent that lingered on the landing outside Peggy’s bedroom door. As always, Peggy was smartly dressed, though black did not really suit her pale, rather thin, face. And her make-up, usually so carefully applied, was a little blotchy. Peggy straightened up, and, resting her hands lightly on the girl’s shoulders, looked down into Ella’s upturned face.

  ‘You all right, Ella?’ she asked softly.

  Peggy’s kindness threatened to overwhelm her but Ella nodded and asked, ‘Am I going back with you, Aunty Peggy? Am I going home?’

  There was a silence in the kitchen, only the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece and the hiss of the kettle on the hob broke the silence.

  ‘I – I don’t know, love. We’ll talk about it later.’ She turned back to her buttering.

  ‘Hello, pet.’ Rosie smiled brightly as she emerged from the pantry carrying out cups, saucers and plates, fruit cake and pastries.

  ‘Gran said I was to come and help,’ Ella said.

  ‘Well, you can carry things through to the parlour, if you like. Start with these plates and then come back for the other things. I’ll put everything I want you to take through here, look, on the corner of the kitchen table.’

  ‘Aunty Peg.’ Ella moved closer to the table and took hold of the plates.

  ‘Mmm?’ The knife flashed across the rounds of bread, smearing a film of butter across each one.

  ‘Who was the man standing under the trees in the churchyard?’

  The knife was still, suspended in mid-air. Peggy looked up and stared at her, but the question came from Isobel: ‘What man, Ella?’

  Ella glanced round the three faces now watching her, though Rosie, still bustling between kitchen and pantry, was ignoring the conversation.

  ‘While we were at the – the grave, there was a tall man standing under the trees near the fence. He was still there when we came away. I think . . .’ Ella hesitated. She had first noticed the man when she had looked away from Uncle Danny, whose tears had disconcerted her; embarrassed, she had turned her gaze away but not back to the coffin now lying at the bottom of the deep pit – she hadn’t wanted to look at that either. And so her gaze had wandered and gone beyond the black-clad figures surrounding the grave, only to see the motionless figure of the tall man standing beneath the dripping trees watching them, his head bowed as if he too were taking part in the ceremony but did not like to approach too close.

  ‘Go on,’ Peggy urged.

  ‘I think after we left he – he walked over to – to the grave. When we were walking down the path, I looked back again.’ She lowered her gaze, not wanting to admit that she had not wanted to leave her mother lying in the half-frozen earth.

  ‘What did he look like?’ Mavis put in.

  Ella screwed up her face, trying to recapture the picture in her mind. ‘He’d got a long black coat on and he’d got curly fair hair, I think, but he was in the shadows under the trees. I couldn’t see him ever so well. He just stood there with his hands in his pockets. He never moved, not till we’d gone, but he was watching us all the time.’

  ‘One of the undertaker’s men, I expect, just standing ready but keeping a respectful distance,’ Peggy suggested, resuming her sandwich-making.

  Ella saw Isobel and Mavis exchange a look.

  ‘You don’t think . . .’ Isobel began but Mavis put her forefinger warningly to her lips and glanced meaningfully at Ella.

  ‘Take those plates through for Rosie, Ella love,’ Peggy said. Although Ella picked up the plates and left the kitchen, once in the passage leading to the front room, she paused and stood listening.

  ‘You don’t think,’ Isobel was saying again, ‘it was him?’

  ‘How could it have been? How would he know about Kate’s death?’ Mavis answered.

  ‘Well, Danny said that she’d gone off that afternoon to meet someone. She wouldn’t say who. It was all very mysterious. Perhaps . . .’

  At that moment Ella heard Rosie’s footsteps tapping across the tiled floor of the kitchen towards the door. ‘I’ll just take these through,’ Ella heard her say and the girl was obliged to move quickly into the front room before Rosie caught her eavesdropping. She scuttled into the parlour and dumped the plates on to the table and turned to hurry back to hear more.

  ‘Careful with those plates, Missy. Don’t go breaking Rosie’s best china.’

  ‘No, Gran,’ she called back as she rushed to the kitchen, arriving in time to hear Isobel say, ‘He was the only one she was really close to at that time. You know he was.’

  Again Rosie was coming up behind her and as Ella stepped into the kitchen both Isobel and Mavis fell silent. Ella picked up two saucers, the two cups balancing on the top and turned away again. Once out of the kitchen, she hovered again near the door.

  ‘Maybe we ought to try and find him anyway, for the kid’s sake?’ Isobel was saying.

  ‘Do you really think so?’ Mavis’s tone was doubtful. ‘He – he never knew about her, did he?’

  ‘Mmm.’ Isobel drew deeply on her cigarette. ‘You have a point there, Mave.’ There was a pause and then Isobel added, ‘Poor little scrap. What’ll happen to her now?’

  In the passage, Ella stood perfectly still, holding her breath, waiting for the answer.

  ‘I suppose she’ll stay here with Kate’s mother, won’t she?’

  Ella gasped and did not realize the cups and saucers had slid from her grasp until the crash at her feet and a jagged piece of porcelain hitting her leg made her jump and cry out. From all directions, grown-ups came hurrying.

  ‘Oh, lovey, have you hurt yourself?’

  ‘Whatever are you doing, child? I told you to be careful.’ This from her grandmother.

  Tears blinded her. She wouldn’t live in Brumbys’ Farm where the wind battered at the house and the sea invaded it. She wouldn’t stay here with this horrible woman who did not, and never would, love her.

  With a sob, Ella ran back through the kitchen, dragged open the back door and raced across the yard towards the barn. She heard them calling her but she ran on.

  It was Rob who found her a little later burrowed beneath the straw in the loft above the big barn at Rookery Farm. He said nothing but sat down beside her, wriggling into the straw to make himself a little nest too.

  He held out a plate towards her. ‘I’ve brought you some sandwiches. Thought you’d be hungry.’

  She shook her head, clenching her teeth together stubbornly, though her stomach was now rumbling with emptiness.

  ‘Oh, well, I’ll eat ’em, then.’ He picked one up and took a huge bite, munching with deliberate pleasure.

  She reached out swiftly and grabbed one, stuffing it into her mouth. What would her grandmother say if she could see her now, she thought with glee. The plate wobbled and two sandwiches fell into the straw. ‘Butterfingers.’ Rob gri
nned, picked them carefully out of the straw and put them back on to the plate.

  The two youngsters ate in silence in the deepening gloom of the hayloft.

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ he said airily. ‘They want you back at the house. Yar grandpa and grannie are leaving soon.’

  ‘I’m not going back with her.’

  ‘Well, you can’t stay up here for ever.’

  ‘I’m going back to Lincoln with Aunty Peggy or – or with . . .’ She bit her lip, half wanting to confide in Rob and yet years of covering up the bald truth made her hesitate still. She wanted to blurt out, Have they said any more about the man in the churchyard? Have they said who he was? The thoughts were burning inside her head. Was he – could he have been my father? Instead, she sat silently, digging her hands into the prickly straw and gripping handfuls of it in frustration.

  ‘I don’t reckon you’re goin’ back to Lincoln. They’ve been arguing half the afternoon.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘All on ’em. Even your aunty Peg and – er – Isobel and Mavis, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, them an’ all. And me dad and mum. Even my grandma put her two penn’orth in till your grannie told her to mind her own business and stay out of her affairs. Dun’t tek ’em long to get back to their feudin’, does it?’

  ‘Your grandma was good when we first got the news, though,’ Ella said in a small voice. There was another pause then she asked, ‘What did Aunty Peggy say? Did she say I could go back with her?’

  She heard the straw rustle as he moved. ‘Er, well, not exactly. See, she – they all agreed that with her not bein’ married and going out to work ev’ry day, well, she won’t be at home to look after you—’

  ‘I bet she never said that,’ Ella defended Peggy hotly. ‘I bet that was her – Gran.’

  ‘No, as a matter of fact, it was your grandpa who said it wouldn’t be fair on either Peg or you.’

  Another silence.

  ‘And Aunty Isobel and Aunty Mavis? What did they say?’

  ‘We-ell, er . . .’ He hesitated and then asked, ‘Which is the posh one in uniform who smokes?’

  ‘Isobel.’

  ‘She said she can’t take you ’cos she’s still in the forces.’

  ‘Are you sure they didn’t say any more? I mean, about anybody else?’

  He stared at her through the gloom. ‘Who else is there?’

  There was a pause until, in a small voice, she said, ‘No one, I suppose.’

  At his next words, her hopes leapt. ‘But the other one, she said you could go to her. “Won’t notice her among my rowdy three,” she said.’

  Oh, good old Aunty Mavis. Ella scrambled up. ‘That’s it then. I’ll go with Aunty Mavis.’

  But her hopes were short-lived. As she entered the kitchen with Rob behind her, her grandmother’s voice was the first to greet her.

  ‘There you are. Go and get yar coat. We must be off home now.’

  In front of them all, ranged around the big room, Ella faced her grandmother. ‘I’m not staying here. I want to go home with Aunty Mavis.’ She glanced beyond her grandmother and caught Mavis’s glance. ‘I can, can’t I, Aunty Mave?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  In a voice that would tolerate no argument, either from Ella or from anyone else, Esther said, ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort, Missy. You’re coming home with me. You’re my responsibility now.’

  Ten

  The storms raged on for days. Not the elements now, but the tempest between Ella and her grandmother.

  ‘I won’t live here in this God-forsaken place.’

  ‘Mind your language, Missy.’

  ‘I don’t belong here. You don’t want me. You don’t love me.’

  ‘Don’t be so silly, child. You’re my flesh and blood. It’s my duty to look after you.’

  Ella stared at her, waiting, willing her grandmother to say the words she so desperately needed to hear from her. But Esther turned away and poked the fire vigorously, muttering only, ‘We’re stuck with each other, Missy, so you’d best get used to it.’

  Ella swallowed the lump of disappointment that rose in her throat and hardened her resolve. ‘Well, I don’t like it here,’ she said, stubbornly determined not to be cowed. ‘I want to go back to Lincoln.’

  ‘There’s nowhere for you to go back to.’ Esther’s words were harsh, but sadly, the truth; even Ella had to acknowledge that fact now.

  Peggy, with troubled eyes, had quietly explained that she, a single woman with a full-time job, could not look after a ten-year-old properly. ‘Maybe they’ll let you come in the holidays and spend a few days with me,’ she added, and had touched Ella’s cheek gently. ‘When I can get time off work.’

  The girl had nodded, clenching her teeth together, willing herself not to cry, not in front of Peggy, not in front of anyone and certainly she would never, ever, let her grandmother see her tears.

  Even Mavis, in the end, had reluctantly admitted that it would be best if Ella went to live with her grandparents. ‘I – I’m not sure what the law is, pet. Your grannie will have, what do they call it, custody of you?’

  It sounded as if she were going to prison and to Ella that’s exactly what it felt like.

  The only occasion when the girl had felt a surge of hope had been when Jonathan had said quietly one supper time, ‘It’s another very high tide again this weekend, Esther. We ought to go inland. Maybe we could go to Peg’s for a few days.’

  ‘Oh, Grandpa, yes!’

  ‘We’re not going anywhere, Jonathan. I’m not leaving my farm to the mercy of the sea or to looters. If the flood comes again, then we’ll be in it again.’

  And Ella’s brief spark of hope was snuffed out.

  Only two weeks after her mother’s funeral, all their belongings from Lincoln, pathetically few it seemed, arrived on a removal van to be dumped in the corner of the big bedroom upstairs where Ella now slept. Kate’s clothes, her precious sewing machine and a square, polished box. Ella tried to lift the lid, but the box was locked and there was no key. Perhaps it had been in her mother’s handbag; that would have been with her in the car . . . Ella shuddered and pushed the box away from her.

  With tears prickling her eyelids, she fingered her mother’s favourite dress, held a warm, woolly cardigan to her cheek. Kate’s perfume still lingered and in the privacy of her bedroom, Ella buried her face in its softness, breathing in the closeness of her mother and wept bitter, lonely tears. Then she ran her hands over the smooth lid of the sewing machine with which Kate had earned their keep as a dressmaker, using the front parlour as a workroom in the terraced house in Lincoln. Ella gave a gulp. Never again would she hear the whir of the machine from the front room where pins and paper patterns and lengths of fabric littered every surface, even the floor; or hear her mother’s merry laughter as she talked with her customers who called for fittings. She had thought the house they lived in was theirs or at least that it belonged to both her mother and Aunty Peggy, but now it seemed that they had only been lodgers: the house belonged solely to Peggy Godfrey.

  Ella could still not quite believe that Peggy really did not want her to live with her and she clung to the thought that it was all Esther Godfrey’s fault. Her grandmother didn’t want her, Ella thought, not really, but she saw it as her duty to look after her daughter’s orphan; her bastard orphan.

  So it seemed she would have to stay at Brumbys’ Farm at least for the present, but she clung to the vow she had flung in a final fury at her grandmother, ‘One day I’ll run away . . .’

  ‘Where would you run to?’ had been the disparaging answer, whilst poor Jonathan had stood helplessly between them.

  ‘Anywhere. Anywhere away from here. Away from you!’

  ‘How? There’s no buses out here.’

  ‘Then I’ll walk if I have to!’ Ella had set her firm jaw in a hard, determined line.

  For a moment she saw her grandmother looking at her strangely, nodding slowly. ‘Aye, Miss
y, I believe you would, an’ all.’ Her tone then had been soft, wondering, and Ella had seen the look that passed between her grandparents.

  ‘More like me than I care to admit,’ Esther had said quietly.

  Jonathan had spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of helplessness, beaten by the wilful strength of the two with whom he must now share his home.

  About three weeks after Kate’s funeral, Rob arrived at Brumbys’ Farm one morning, carrying the black and white kitten, now a fluffy, wriggling ball of mischief with wide open eyes.

  ‘I’ve asked yar grannie if you can have a kitten and she said yes.’

  ‘She did?’ Ella was startled for a moment.

  ‘Well, why shouldn’t she? A cat’s no trouble to keep on a farm and, besides, I told her I thought it’d be company for you.’

  ‘Oh.’ For a moment the disappointment that the kindness had not come from her grandmother was acute. For the first time since the dreadful news about her mother had reached them, Ella’s smile was genuine as she took the wriggling little kitten into her arms. Its tiny claws sticking through her jumper, the kitten climbed up Ella’s chest and nuzzled her neck, licking her with its rough tongue and greeting her with a high-pitched, frantic purring.

  ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’

  ‘Boy.’

  ‘Oh, he’s lovely. What’s his name?’

  ‘Hasn’t got one. You can call him what you like.’

  Ella wrinkled her brow. ‘I don’t know what sort of name you call a cat.’

  ‘Well, there’s – um – er – well, anything really.’

  ‘Let’s ask Grandpa. He’s swilling out the cowshed.’

  As they walked towards the building, Rob said, ‘How’s things in the house? I mean, all the muck the sea left.’