The Glass Virgin

by Catherine Cookson

  She turned to him now and said in a breathless sort of way, ‘But . . . but that woman, she’s been sleeping in there and . . . and she had consumption.’

  In less time than it had taken her to speak his face was suffused with anger. His eyes narrowed, his tone grim, he said, ‘All right, don’t sleep on it, you can have this.’ He flapped his own hand towards the floor. ‘The trouble with you is you’re afraid of the death you’ll never die, you’re more likely to go from exposure than you are from consumption.’

  ‘That may be so, but I would prefer it that way.’ Her voice was stiff, haughty.

  ‘Oh my God!’ He turned from her and what he was about to say next was checked by the outer door opening and the woman entering. She stared at them both hard for a moment before saying, ‘He told you you’d have your dinner?’

  When Manuel didn’t answer the woman, Annabella nodded her head and said, ‘Ye-aye,’ and the woman fixed her gaze on her as she went on, ‘It’s a good oven; it gives plenty of heat in the winter and there’s wood for chopping. Now about your work, you’ll start at four o’clock . . . ’

  ‘F . . . four?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I said. You’re not hard of hearing, are you?’ She waited. ‘You’ll weigh the milk an’ help get the cans on to the road for the town. After, you’ll scour all the coolers and the cans ready for the next lot. Breakfast at seven, you get half an hour for that; after, you’ll help in the house; there’s always plenty of washing and scrubbing in there. Dinner’s at three. Then you bring the cows in from the meadows and you’re finished at six. That gives you plenty of time to see to this.’ She nodded her head three times; then looking at Manuel, she added, ‘The master will see to you. Milkin’ and ploughin’ for you.’ Her eyes went back to Annabella again and she said, ‘Don’t forget, four o’clock it is; I don’t put up with lazybones.’

  When the door was closed Annabella looked at Manuel; then like the child who had once appealed to him, she said, ‘Oh, Manuel, what am I going to do?’

  He didn’t look at her as he answered, ‘I told you, didn’t I? But still’ – he paused for a moment – ‘it sounds a lot but it’s all routine. The hardest part is gettin’ up at that hour. Anyway, we’ve got a roof over us. But now, to get back to the bed. What’s your choice?’

  She looked into his face before she said quietly, ‘I’d rather sleep in here.’ Then she watched his white teeth bite hard down on to his lower lip, and she actually jumped as he shouted at her, ‘You won’t then, you’ll take the bed. I’ll put the things out in the air and shake them. Have some sense. If you’ve got to die of consumption then you’ll die of the consumption. What’s important is we’ll want our rest, an’ I won’t welcome you screaming the night because cockroaches, field mice, or rats are visiting you, so it’s the bed.’ And on this he marched out, saying, ‘Now if I can get that damn fire started we might have a sup tea.’

  She sat down heavily in a chair. She had the feeling that someone had suddenly taken her by the shoulders and shaken her. She would never have believed that Manuel would have spoken to her like that, acted like that without any consideration for her fears of such a dreadful disease as consumption. And that woman had said she must rise at four o’clock in the morning. Would she ever be able to do all the things required of her? Well, she was here and she must, if only to show Manuel that she could. After all she was intelligent and educated, as she had already pointed out to him, and these attributes should enable her to equal him in learning things, as he had boasted, in half the time. Servants as a rule were slow because they were without education, and of low intelligence; she would show him what she could do. She must look upon the whole thing as an experiment. Yes, that’s what she must do, look upon the whole thing as an experiment.

  Two

  The experiment nearly killed her. It brought the wrath of her mistress on her nearly every hour of the day, and if it hadn’t been that the farmer was greatly taken with Manuel and his capacity for work, then Annabella would surely have found herself, and her bundle, on the road before the first day was over.

  For five weeks the sun shone most of the time, bringing with it a drought, and the mud in the yard had caked into hard ridges, except along each side of the sewage drain that ran in front of the cowsheds past the corner of the farmhouse and down to the burn, from which came the only supply of water when the well dried up, which happened, Mary Jane told Annabella, pretty often in the summer, and not only now when the land was parched.

  Mary Jane was a kindly girl and without her covert help Annabella’s total ignorance of kitchen and dairy would have brought not only her mistress’ wrath down on her, but pertinent questions.

  Mary Jane had taken to Annabella. The new help was different. She couldn’t quite explain it to herself, she only knew that Annabella was like no-one else she had encountered in her life.

  Nor had Annabella encountered anyone like Mary Jane. She was filled with horror when the girl related that she, together with Andy, the deaf mute who was the only other hand on the farm and who communicated in grunts and through wide pain-filled eyes, had been taken from the Hexham Workhouse five years ago when she was eleven and he twelve. They had both got sixpence a week for the first two years, then Andy got a shilling, but she had only come to get a shilling, she said, when the bairn was born.

  The bairn lay in a wicker basket in the corner of the open spit fireplace, being moved only for feeding and when the meat was being hooked. It was enveloped in clothes up to its chin, its face was always red with the heat, and it rarely cried. It was changed once a day and it smelt continuously.

  Annabella had thought at first the baby belonged to Mrs Skillen, but Mary Jane informed her on the quiet that it was hers, and that – HE – had given it her. HE was not Andy, as Annabella had first surmised, but Mr Skillen.

  This knowledge had made Annabella physically sick. Since this nightmare life had engulfed her she had, she thought, encountered nothing but depravity. Strangely, she never set Lagrange’s lapses under this heading or owned that it was he who had first made her aware of the . . . unmentionable thing.

  It was ten minutes to six on this particular sun-drenched day and she felt ill with fatigue. Four o’clock this morning she had struggled out of bed and for two hours she had ladled milk from the small cans into churns; then she had helped Andy to roll them into the yard where Manuel pushed them up the ramp and on to the flat cart and drove them over the rough road to the point where the carrier would pick them up and take them to the town.

  At first Annabella had been afraid of Andy, for he would spend minutes gazing at her as if in a trance, but she had come to know he was quite harmless and evoking her compassion she talked to him, safe in the knowledge that he could make no comment on her speech. Not like Mrs Skillen who, coming upon her talking to Mary Jane, had demanded, ‘Where’d you learn to talk high ’n’ mighty?’ and she had been quick to reply, ‘I was brought up in a convent.’ ‘You a Catholic?’ Mrs Skillen had then asked with deep suspicion in her face and voice, and when she received a flat ‘No’ she had nodded vigorously, saying, ‘An’ you’d better not be or you won’t remain here long. Mr Skillen, he can’t abide Catholics. Lying, drinkin’ lot!’

  As she wrung out the last dish-clout the clock on the mantelpiece told her there were still seven minutes to go before it would chime six. She had dared to leave at quarter to six one evening but she had hardly entered the cottage door before Mrs Skillen had burst in on her, crying, ‘Get back over there! You’re not going to start this.’

  As she turned from the bench she saw Mary Jane stoop and pick the child from the basket, then, sitting down, bare her breast to it. This sight too had at first repulsed her, but now she found she could look at it without even feeling embarrassment. She lowered herself heavily on to the wooden form that was placed at right angles to the black ovens at the end of the room and slowly h
er body concertinaed into a restful slump. But only for a minute, for she almost upset the form when the voice from the doorway said, ‘This is it, is it, soon as me back’s turned? You’ve got a good five minutes, and get that table sanded.’

  Annabella, outwardly scurrying, inwardly coldly raging against this awful woman, was going towards the cupboard where the sand was kept when Mary Jane’s voice checked her, for she was saying to Mrs Skillen in a tone that held authority, ‘She’s been on her feet all day long, what if she should tell her man how you keep on and he goes, the master won’t like that will he, ’cos he’s taken with him. He says he’s the best worker he’s had in many a year, willin’ like. I’d go careful if I was you. That I would.’

  Annabella looked from the young girl, with the baby pulling hungrily at her full breast, to the thin, grim woman staring down at her. Her face suffused with hate, she looked like an animal about to spring yet knowing that she couldn’t because of the chains holding her. And now Mary Jane said, ‘He told me last night that Manuel would have that road meeting the main one in less than a month, and then he was gona start him brickin’ the yard. He’s had four fellows on that road you know in the last year, and he said if he’d put me on I’d have done better than them.’

  Annabella realised that Mary Jane wasn’t only talking about Manuel and the road, she was telling Mrs Skillen something else.

  Mrs Skillen now hunched her shoulders up around her neck as she said through clenched teeth, ‘You’ve got a surprise coming to you, me girl; his fancy soon fades, and then God help you. If I’m alive, God help you.’

  ‘He will an’ all, He always has.’

  Annabella watched the woman she had to call mistress hurry from the room; then she looked at Mary Jane. The girl was smiling placidly and nodding at her. ‘Get yersel off,’ she said; ‘he’ll be wantin’ his tea.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you, Mary Jane.’ As if she were taking an order from a superior, Annabella turned about and left the kitchen. At this moment she loved Mary Jane. She supposed that by certain standards she was a wicked girl, and how she could possibly tolerate that repulsive little man she didn’t know, but she knew she loved her because she had dared to stand up to that woman.

  She entered the cottage with a sense of elation. Now that Mary Jane had shown herself to be the favourite, life promised to be a little easier; yet the elation evaporated at the sight the room presented. The floor was dirty with caked mud, the utensils that were used for breakfast were still on the table, and she was so tired, so very tired. She thought, as she had done numerous times of late, that never again would she feel the bodily wonder of being rested.

  The fire was low, it had to be blown; the dishes had to be washed, that was after she had been down to the river to get the water to wash them with; and she had to wash herself, but again only after she had brought the water up from the river; and all she wanted to do was to sleep. Sitting down at the table, she pushed the dishes aside and, folding her arms, she laid her head upon them.

  A touch on the shoulder brought her out of a dream in which she had been eating her breakfast in bed, and she stared up at Manuel for a moment as if she didn’t recognise him, and then shaking her head, she said, ‘I’m sorry, I . . . ’ She always seemed to be saying the same words to him, I’m sorry, always apologising.

  ‘It’s all right.’ He swung a chair round and sat at the table facing her, and abruptly he said, ‘Do you think you could stick this another two months?’

  When she continued to stare at him he said, ‘It’s hellish, I know, but it’s like this. If you can stick it out, there’s the hirings in Hexham on the eleventh of November and we could go there, and with the experience we’ve had here pick up a good job.’ He smiled wryly, then wiped the sweat off each side of his face with the back of his hand before adding, ‘It would have to be bad to be worse than this, wouldn’t it?’

  She made no answer, just continued to stare at him. It would be bad to be worse than this, yes indeed it would. But she had thought that they were to be here for the entire winter, at the end of which time she felt she would be unrecognisable, even to herself. Her hands were red and swollen, the nails broken, and the skin of her face, which had not felt a cream or lotion since the day she left the House, and which before then had rarely been touched by the sun, was now almost as brown as his.

  ‘I’ve got something to ask you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  His eyes dropped away from hers and putting his hand on top of a dirty mug he began moving it backwards and forwards across the table before he spoke again. ‘It’s like this.’ The movement of the mug stopped; his eyes were looking straight into hers. ‘If I get a better job I’ll likely be bonded, properly bonded. I’ve told him I won’t bond us here, do what he likes. Well, I want to be able to sign me name . . . I want to learn to write, read and write.’

  She remembered vaguely hearing of him wanting to read and write before this, something connected with Miss Howard.

  ‘Will you, I mean, learn me?’

  Seconds passed before she said, ‘Yes, Manuel, I’ll . . . I’ll teach you to read and write.’

  She had laid slight stress on the word teach and he recognised he had gone wrong somewhere, and again he wiped the sweat from the sides of his face with the back of his hand. There was more he needed to learn than just reading and writing, but he would come by it, aye begod! he would come by it. She might never be of use to him in any other way but she would in this. He said now, ‘There’s plenty of slate on the hillside; I’ll get a big bit the morrow and chip down a piece to write with, like the school bairns have.’

  She was staring at him, and of a sudden she wanted to cry. She didn’t know really why, all she knew she wanted to cry . . . while leaning her head against him.

  ‘Thanks.’ His voice was soft, and he returned her gaze for a moment longer, then he rose from the table, adding; ‘Let’s get some tea and the place cleaned up.’

  It was an hour and a half later when he said to her, ‘I’ve brought you some water up to wash; I’ll away down to the river.’ He had half turned from her when he swung around again and his eyes narrowed as he asked, ‘Why don’t you come down and wash in the river?’

  ‘What! Oh no. No, thank you.’ It was Miss Annabella speaking and he smiled wryly at her and said slowly, as if he were explaining something to a child, ‘Look, there’s nobody going to see you, and it’ll be deep twilight by the time we get along to the place where I go. There’s only one way down and the little pool’s sheltered under a lee of rocks; it’s off the main stream and the water will just be coolish. It’s a wonderful place. Come on.’ He held out his hand to her, but she still stood stiffly, and when he bent towards her bringing his head level with hers she bowed her head as he went on, ‘I promise you no-one will see you, only God. Those things must be sticking to you.’ He flicked his finger at her serge skirt, no longer blue, but stained now with overall patches of green and black.

  ‘Aw, come on.’ She felt herself jerked forward and out of the door; then just as quickly jerked back into the room again as he said laughingly, ‘You’ll want this,’ and reaching out to the iron rod that hung above the bread oven he pulled off a coarse towel, then grabbed at a piece of blue mottled soap from out of a dish standing on a bench, and, swinging her round and outside again, he ran her from the back of the house down the field path to the river and along its bank until, gasping, she cried, ‘Please! Oh please, Manuel, stop.’

  When he did she stood panting and holding her side, ‘I’ve got a stitch . . . How far is it?’

  ‘About ten minutes more.’

  She looked up at the sky. The twilight this evening seemed slow in merging into night.

  At one point they were walking through a thicket with no sign of the river when he stopped her with a touch on the arm, and, pointing to an almost imperceptible opening in the hedge
to the left of them, said, ‘This way. Come in sideways and mind your hair doesn’t get caught up.’

  She felt the broken branches of the thicket tearing at her clothes, but only for a minute because the next two steps brought her into a clearing, which was bordered by thick scrub. She followed him through an opening at the side, then on to a grassy slope that had a rim of boulders, and there below was the river flowing fast over submerged rocks, and some yards away to the right, as he had said, in the lee of the main stream was a little pool. The only way to it was over the boulders and downwards and, pointing, he said, ‘When you get down there you’ll find a crevasse to the right, it’s nice and dry, where you can put your clothes. Stay as long as you like, I’ll be up above.’

  She did not ask, ‘When are you going to bathe?’ The situation was too embarrassing, speech would only make it worse. She walked away from him and carefully let herself down from one steep boulder to the next until she was on the shore of the little pool. As he said, there was the crevasse like a stone-walled dressing room. Before she went into it she looked back, but there was no sight of him.

  Slowly she began to undress, but when she reached her chemise she found she couldn’t take it off and walk the dozen steps to the water’s edge.

  Seconds passed into minutes before, clutching the soap and rough towel, she edged her way from the shelter and towards the water. When she reached the edge of the pool she glanced apprehensively back towards the boulders, but she could hardly make them out for the twilight was speeding into night now, and it was only the thought that Manuel would want to come down after she was out which spurred her to the last effort.