Jude

by Betty Burton

  For a few seconds Bella looked at Jude, who would not look back. “I said to him, why not come to Morning Service on Sunday, and I’d make him a rare good pie. In his lodgings he don’t never get no good cooking. I thought you might do one of your rabbit-pies with a lot of herbs and the apple wine. You know, like you do.”

  Oh Mother! I can read you easier than a book.

  “I had definitely made up my mind to take Hanna over to Jaen’s and I’ve told Hanna now. We haven’t been since before Christmas,” Jude said.

  “Well then, another week won’t hurt.”

  “We can’t really leave it any longer, especially now the weather’s set fine for a bit. Get into March and it’ll as likely change and we shall be into planting-time, and you know I always hate that road when the trees drip.”

  “Trees drip everywhere.”

  “Not like they do on that mile or two going into Newton.”

  “The days a be that much longer if you leave it a week.”

  They wrangled on for a few more exchanges until Jude said, “Oh mother, just because you asked Will Vickery to stop and eat on a Sunday, it don’t mean I have to be here as well. You enjoy each other’s company. You’ll be able to make a to-do over dinner. You’ll both like that.”

  Bella did not know what to say. Jude kept stirring the frizzling bacon and potatoes; trying to pass Will’s visit off, as though it was nothing to do with her.

  “He don’t come to see me,” Bella said at last.

  Jude did not answer.

  There was strain between them the rest of the week and early on Sunday Jude got the two donkeys ready and set off with Hanna. Bella knew that Jude had the upper hand. Nothing had ever been said about Jude and Will Vickery. To all intents and purposes, Will was no more than Fred Warren’s assistant who paid friendly visits to Croud Cantle when he was in the area, and who Bella had invited to share their Christmas dinner. Nothing more. If Bella had chosen to invite him again then that was all right.

  She came to the door as Jude was tucking shawls about Hanna.

  “What shall I tell him?”

  “Who?” asked Jude, intending to appear preoccupied.

  “Jude! You know blimmen well.”

  “Will? Tell him Hanna hasn’t seen Jaen for ages and now the ground has started to warm up we shan’t have much time. There’ll be plenty of other times when he can come.”

  “Look Hanna!” I called, as we rode down Howgaite on the promised visit to Newton Clare, “the fairy-soldiers’ plumes are out.” This was the name Jaen had given to the tiny, brilliant scarlet tufts of the female hazel catkin.

  There were times when it seemed that Hanna and I should change our roles; when she, with her seriousness and responsible outlook, should be the aunt and I the niece. She was always kind to me in my fanciful enthusiasms, but gently disapproving. “Oh Jude, you are not much of a lady, are you?

  It was soon after dawn when we left. The weather had become milder and blustering winds were beginning to get up, which did not please me because such weather always makes me uneasy. There had been deep frosts all winter, and much of the underwood of holly, birch and ash was stripped of its lower bark by rabbits, who will take anything for sustenance in a hard winter. Hares, too, had been at many of the hazels. The young shoots being cut off clean as if by a sharp knife. Here and there I saw the first signs of regeneration: the slight swelling and shine of new buds in leaf axils of the traveller’s joy; its clots of beard, which had been white and fluffy in the autumn, now brittle and tattered. I cannot remember when I first noticed this death and regeneration going on together, but it seems that I have seen it a hundred times. It never fails to fill me with an emotion that I cannot give a name to, but it is a mingling of joy and regret.

  My sister and her husband lived then at Ham Ford Farm. Dan Hazelhurst, no longer farming the small acreage he had started with, had gained more land and had now turned almost all of it to wheat-growing, so that their fortunes depended entirely on this one crop.

  It was several months since I had brought Hanna to visit her parents. I saw at once that Jaen was yet again pregnant. I say “yet again”, because it was less than nine years ago that she was a bride. Hanna was eight, and had five younger brothers, and I know that Jaen had been through at least one “misfortune”.

  I did not know whether to congratulate or commiserate, so I hugged her and patted her mound, and said smilingly, “What is this one to be then?”

  “A Hazelhurst, no doubt,” she said, without any suggestion of a smile.

  I wished that I could have picked her up and run back with her to Cantle. Back in time; to when her hair was abundant and the same colour as the wreaths of rest-harrow flowers she let me bind into it; back to when the worst of our problems was to remember not to walk upon our mother’s bright floor with muddy feet; to when she took me by the hand and led me out on to the great green breast of Tradden Raike.

  She petted Hanna, holding her face and smoothing her hair but, as always, they behaved to one another in a polite and restrained way. I have often wondered what Hanna thought of the arrangement; living with her grandmother and aunt whilst her mother cared for an ever-increasing family of little boys. She never wanted to stay there very long.

  “Goodness, child, you gets more like Jude every time I sees you,” Jaen said.

  Hanna looked at me as though she did not know what to make of that.

  The house was empty except for Jaen and one or two girls who worked in the house and the dairy. Jaen said that Dan had taken the boys to morning service and to visit other Hazelhursts, but her legs were too swelled up to do that these days.

  “I’m glad you come, Ju,” Jaen said. “The packman had some coffee beans, which he says is the fashion, and I thought I would give us a treat.”

  For the time that it took her to grind the beans and brew the drink, she was quite animated and jolly.

  Hanna, already bored – which she seldom was at Croud Cantle – went out with one of the maids. The girl did not appear to be much older than Hanna, but already had the hollow-eyed look that many little servant-girls get just before they drag themselves into womanhood.

  “Oh Ju, I wish you wasn’t so far away. It’s so lonely.”

  Jaen said this same thing every time I visited, and I never knew what to reply. I did know, however, that it was not so much that she was isolated, for the house seemed always to be bursting with people and children. It was that she felt cut off from people who knew her, knew Jaen Nugent, knew a person who belonged to herself – not Young Dannal’s mother; not Baxter’s or Francis’s mother; not Dan Hazel-hurst’s wife.

  “I wish I could come over more often,” I said.

  This was not true. It was no pleasure for me to see the deterioration of my pretty, lively, intelligent sister, whose imagination had been more vivid than that of Dean Swift – ah, what sparkling adventures Gulliver would have had under Jaen’s guidance.

  We sat with our feet in the hearth, sipping the bitter, aromatic drink and saying how delicious it was; talking in a desultory way about mother, the farm, what was going on in the market these days when, almost mid-sentence, she said, “You got a young man, Ju.”

  I was quite taken aback, firstly because we have always been a reticent family and secondly because she did not frame a question. It was a statement, an observation.

  “You been listening to gossip, Jaen?”

  “Never a word.”

  “You know what they say about Jude Nugent – she wants a man made to order.”

  “Oh Ju, I care that much about you.” She took my hand and stroked it as one strokes the head of a cat. “Don’t keep it all inside.” She just looked at me, her head on one side, and said, “Ju, I can see. It’s writ all over you.”

  I could never hide anything from Jaen. When I was very little she would say, “It’s writ all over your face,” and I would be puzzled as to what was there, never having seen my face. Again, now, I knew what was writ on me.

&n
bsp; “How serious is it?”

  I could not meet her eye.

  “Oh Ju! You haven’t gone and . . .” My cheeks burned, because I knew that she would find me out as she always has done. She sounded quite anguished, her voice rose. “Look at me, Ju. Go on, look.” She stood before me, her swollen belly at my eye-level. She tore off her cap and she clutched at her front hair. It was sparse and straggly, with little left to suggest that she had once had hair as red and bouncing as a squirrel’s tail.

  “This is what comes of that half a minute of enjoyment.”

  I tried to calm her down, telling her to hush or the girls would hear. She lowered her voice and sat down again, but she was in such earnest that I wished I could laugh at the very suggestion that I had been loved by Will Vickery.

  “Jaen, it wasn’t anything. It was . . .”

  She came and sat beside me in the chimney seat. It was the first time that she had put her arms about me since the day she left home and was married, when I had been so bitterly grieved because she had abandoned me for Dan Hazelhurst. Now I was so overcome by her action that I told her about Will Vickery; of how I liked him and how much I was affected by him.

  “If you can dout that sort of fire, Ju, then dout it. It an’t worth it. Lord help us, if I haven’t learned much in life, I certainly learned that. I wish somebody’d a told me when I was young.”

  Jaen spoke as though she was a generation older than myself instead of only six years, but she must have come to realise that I was now a woman and no longer her toddling sister, for she talked to me about the time when she had gone away for a few days and had met Dan Hazelhurst and conceived Hanna.

  “It was only a moment of foolishness, Ju, and it can alter your whole life. I was young, but I don’t think that makes much difference. It was just . . . Well, you know how big and handsome Dan is. I was overcome by all his attentions. A course, I hadn’t never known nothing like it before, him telling me how pretty and that I was. I never knew it was possible to get into that state where nothing don’t matter except pleasing yourself and him.” She made a thin, tight line of her lips. “It an’t worth it, Ju.” She lowered her voice, speaking almost to herself. “There’s times when I wishes him to Kingdom Come. To him, it’s just his rights as a husband, and his pleasure. To me it’s all this.” She laid a hand on her belly and raised her skirts to reveal huge, white legs, looking like rolls of lard and knotted with purple veins. I drew in my breath at the sight of them.

  “It’s all right, Ju, it an’t nothing but water. Most of it will go when the baby comes.” For a moment she closed her lids over her eyes, as though to blot out any thought of that event.

  “And you don’t intend to marry him?” she asked in her ordinary voice.

  “No,” I replied. “Since I learned to read and write, I know just enough to show me that there’s better things than growing salads and selling pies, but being tied down to a husband and children isn’t one of them, even if the husband were Will Vickery.”

  “What shall you do, Ju?”

  “I don’t know. I would like to get away from the farm. I don’t even know what I can do. I don’t see how I can know till I know what goes on. Do that makes sense?”

  “There might be summit goes on in other places that don’t go on in Cantle that you don’t know about?”

  “I heard the other day that there’s public libraries starting up in some places. Well somebody has to work in them, and it’d be just the kind of thing I’d love to do. But you wouldn’t never know they even exists in a place like Cantle. Jaen, I want to do something, something, something! I shall go off my head if I can’t use it.”

  “I thought you was writing a story.”

  “I am, but that’s just my pleasure. I want to do something that’s going to make a bit of difference.”

  “If you’d a been a man you could a gone to sea.” She withdrew into her mind, as I had seen her do throughout my childhood when she let her imagination wander, and gazed at the flames licking at the base of the black cooking pot.

  “You could a been a privateer, putting to sea and going to countries where there’s all different kinds of birds and fruit and that, and you could go to places like Gilly Gilson used to tell us of, where water shoots out of the ground already boiled. Just imagine that. And you, being that much cleverer than the rest, you’d a soon been the chief one, and when you’d a captured a ship, you could a . . .” She suddenly seemed to see the steaming cooking pot, then covering her nose and mouth in her cupped hand, just like an embarrassed child, said, “Oh Ju, an’t I a fool!”

  It was good to see Jaen laugh, properly. There have been times when she has seemed very strange, getting het up over little things and getting shrill with the children and the maids, and never laughing, except in a forced way.

  “Well, I can’t go to sea, so what am I going to do?” I said.

  “You always been pretty thick with that Mr Warren what taught you to read. I should a thought he might be the one to ask.”

  I had already thought that I might talk to Fred Warren. The only trouble with that was in Will being close to Fred and Molly, and I believed that they would have been pleased to see Will marry me. But as beggars can’t be choosers, I said to Jaen that I would do as she suggested.

  We had about one hour to talk, in which we returned to something like the intimacy of our girlhood, strengthened by Jaen’s acceptance of me as an adult. Then the spell was broken by Hanna coming back.

  “What you been doing, Child?”

  I don’t think I ever heard Jaen call Hanna by her given name after she came to live with Mother and me. Hanna, picking it up from us, always referred to her mother as Jaen.

  “I did the butter, and got the eggs from the banties.”

  “You don’t have to do that, we got girls to do that, and anyway it’s Sunday-day-of-rest.”

  “I like doing it, Jaen, and there isn’t anything else to do.”

  Soon my brother-in-law returned with the little boys, and the house seemed suddenly overflowing. The children were red-cheeked and wind-blown, and brought in with them a healthy smell of children who have been running in the fresh air.

  It was easy to see how the young Jaen had been captivated by Dan. He was a very tall, manly man, of such a breadth of chest that his jacket-fastening – like the strings of the leggings which encased his tree-trunk legs – gave the impression of creaking under the strain of encasing such an amount of muscle. There had been a time when I thought that he was so knowledgeable about government and reform and that kind of thing, but his ideas were immature and uninformed in comparison with those of Fred Warren and Will and, unlike them, he never considered women capable of joining in such discussion – or that it was their place to do so.

  He greeted me in his usual way.

  “Still not married then, Judeth?”

  It was an implied criticism, because of that time when Edwin Hazelhurst had kept calling on me. Dan, thinking what an honour it was for me to be courted by a Hazelhurst, had not forgiven me for spurning his brother. Because I was still not married at the age of twenty-one, he probably thought that I now rued that day.

  “That’s right, Dan, so I’ve still only myself to please.”

  “Well, Girl?” he said to Hanna. “You’ve come on a bit since we last saw you.”

  “Have I, father?”

  “She’s been doing the butter, look, all done nice in the mould.”

  “You’m good at that kind of thing, then?”

  Why did I go on and on so about how good Hanna was at everything? I suppose I must have wanted him to praise her, instead of which he said, “Well, I reckon then, Girl, that you’d be a real help here to your mother.”

  At first I did not comprehend the full meaning of what he had said, so I gushed on.

  “I can’t tell you how much Mother has taught her,” I said, and I laughed, “I wish she’d be half as good at learning to read and write. I’ve been trying to teach her.” I poked Hanna jo
kingly in the ribs. She did not respond, and it was then that I saw how wide-eyed and apprehensive she was as she stared at her father.

  What ever did she feel? That neat, square, stocky little girl, looking up at her huge father. Her father, yet almost a stranger. She knew Fred Warren and Will far better than she knew Dan Hazelhurst.

  The anguish of that day is bound to stay raw and tender, as is any memory involving the heartless treatment of a vulnerable child.

  During the whole battle for Hanna – for that is what it became – she stood white as a sheet, never saying one word. Then, when she at last realised that I had used up every argument I could lay tongue to; when it was apparent that there was nothing left; no reason, no threat, no right that would allow her to return to Cantle with me, she ran from the house with her own water running down her legs and vomited yellow bile in the yard.

  I ran after her and drew her into an outbuilding. She was acutely embarrassed. Humiliated at the physical manifestations of the shock and her fear. Tears and mucus ran down her face. She kept repeating, “I couldn’t help it, Jude. I couldn’t help it,” and I kept answering, “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.” Wet stockings were the least of our troubles, but the removing of them at least gave us something to occupy our hands as I knelt to help with the unknotting of laces. Suddenly she flung herself at me, sending me off balance and we finished up sitting on the straw of the barn floor, with me rocking her and murmuring meaningless sounds that were intended to be comforting. I could scarcely believe that the tense, cold, clammy, clinging small body, was warm, soft Hanna.

  We had come full circle.

  Full circle from that Christmas Day when I had rocked and comforted her once before, a wretched, teething baby who had come to live with us at Cantle; full circle to this day, over seven years later, when with that terrible, chilling unexpectedness her father insisted that she return.

  A great, hard ball of emotions were gathering like a carbuncle in the pit of my stomach. Pain, anguish, misery, despair – yet I could not allow it to burst whilst I held the tormented little girl. Had Dan Hazelhurst appeared at the barn door at that moment, I believe my passion would have been uncontrollable. I should have run him through; pierced his dominating, high and mighty chest with the hay-fork. I was so furious at the way he could just step into our lives and order them, that the plates of muscle would have been as unresisting as rendered lard.