It Happened At Christmas (Anthology)

by Penny Jordan

  His mother shrugged her plump shoulders, glancing at him as she said tartly, ‘Same as she was this morning, and lunchtime, and mid-afternoon.’ She walked across to the massive black-leaded range, opening the oven door and taking out the big tin holding a joint of stuffed roast breast of lamb which was their evening meal. She had taken a pot pie over to the cottage earlier.

  Luke eyed his mother’s stiff back. She had been furious when he had turned up with Connie and the others that evening three weeks ago. Having said that, she’d bedded the lot of them down in the farmhouse and then sat up the whole night with Connie, who had been delirious. But for his mother’s nursing those first few days he doubted the girl would have survived.

  ‘What did the doctor say when he called this afternoon?’ Luke walked across to the big scrubbed kitchen table and took his place at the head of it. Since his father had died five years before, his mother had always insisted he sit there, and if they had guests and used the dining room next to his study she again set his place at the head of the long mahogany table.

  She was a strange mixture, his mother. It had been she, along with Flora and a couple of his labourers’ wives, who had cleaned and aired the empty cottage for Connie and the little ones when the doctor had pronounced she could be moved from one of the spare bedrooms in the farmhouse two weeks ago. The cottage had been left in something of a state by old George, the previous tenant, who had got too old and arthritic to work and gone to live with his married daughter in Newcastle. But when Luke had bought some bits of furniture secondhand to furnish the place she’d raised her eyebrows and muttered under her breath about some people not having the sense they were born with. A couple of days later he’d noticed curtains at the windows of the cottage, which had never been there in old George’s day, and he knew for a fact she’d taken a load of their old sheets and blankets for the little family, along with towels and such.

  ‘The doctor?’ Maggie Hudson placed the joint in front of her son for him to carve, and busied herself with the roast potatoes and vegetables. ‘He’s pleased with her progress, by all accounts. He reckons this time next week she’ll be able to get up and sit in front of the fire, but she’s got to take it steady. He’s of a mind the pleurisy is only part of it. The lass was worn out long before that. At the end of herself, he said she was.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. I told you what their room was like, didn’t I? Our stables are warmer, and a darn sight more spacious.’

  His mother said nothing to this, but once they were eating she suddenly put down her knife and fork and turned to him. ‘I’m going to say it,’ she said flatly. ‘You won’t like it, but I’m going to say it nonetheless. We know nothing about this girl except where she comes from—and that’s none too good. Now, she might be all right, but we don’t know that, and I believe the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I’m holding my horses with regard to the lot of them, Luke. It might be she sees this place as a welcome refuge, or on the other hand as a soft touch.’

  ‘You mean me. She sees me as a soft touch,’ he said quietly. He wasn’t offended. He believed in plain speaking.

  His mother tossed her head. ‘Perhaps.’ And then, her voice softening, she said, ‘She’s a pretty little thing, I’ll give you that, and being in need like she was it brought out the protective side to a man. But the thing is…’ She bit her lip. ‘I don’t want you hurt again. That’s what I’m trying to say.’

  He surveyed her for a moment or two before shaking his head slowly. ‘She’s a child—they all are. Barely out of nappies.’

  ‘They’ve all been out of nappies a good while,’ his mother said tartly. ‘And Connie is going on seventeen. She’s a little wisp of a thing, admittedly, but she’s a woman, Luke.’

  ‘And I’m a twenty-eight-year-old man who buried his wife and child two years ago,’ he ground out harshly.

  ‘Oh, lad, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to rake things up.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mother.’ A muscle worked in his jaw, and he breathed in and out a few times before he said, ‘I had eighteen months of marriage, and believe me I don’t intend to repeat the experience—as you well know. Once was enough for a lifetime. For several lifetimes,’ he finished bitterly. ‘I brought them here because I could do little else. It would have been a death sentence for her and the workhouse for the rest of them if I’d walked away that night. I couldn’t have slept easy ever after.’

  Maggie nodded. After a moment, she said, ‘Eat your dinner,’ and her voice was placatory. ‘You don’t like your food cold.’

  It was much later that night, after Luke had checked on his favourite horse, which had had a touch of colic during the day, that he left the snug stables and walked outside into the frosty darkness. He didn’t make for the farmhouse, but turned and walked away in the opposite direction, up the slight incline that led to the top of a low hill. Here the night sky stretched above him like black velvet, the stars twinkling like so many glittering diamonds and the full moon sailing resplendent in her inky sea. It had snowed again on and off all day, and the countryside was clean and white and sparkling. If he turned his head and looked towards the farm, his labourers’ cottages, four of them in all, had light shining from the windows. All except one. But of course Connie and the children would be asleep by now. He’d noticed they were always the first to be abed.

  In his mind’s eye he pictured Connie as she had been yesterday evening, when he had stopped by for a brief visit once Flora and the lads were back from school. He always made sure the children were home when he called, and this in itself gave the lie to what he had declared to his mother—that he considered Connie a child. She had still looked very pale and fragile, lying propped up against the pillows, but there had been a touch of colour in her cheeks and her deep blue eyes had had a sparkle in them.

  He shook himself, as though dislodging a weight, and turned to face the countryside again. Anyone looking at him would consider him a most fortunate man, and he supposed he was, he thought, drawing the biting air deep into his lungs. Not only did he own a farm of some two thousand acres, a large part of it providing rich good soil for crops and luscious grass for his cattle, but he had never known want in his life. Not of the material kind anyway.

  A shooting star blazed across the sky for a moment and then was gone, and his eyes could see it no more. That was the way love—or what he’d naively assumed was love—had blazed into his life over six years ago, and its exit had been just as final.

  Christabel Ramshaw—the beloved and cossetted only child of neighbouring farmers and the belle of the countryside. And out of all of her many suitors she had chosen him. And so he’d begun courting her, visiting the Ramshaw farm twice a week on Wednesday evenings and Sunday afternoons. They’d have tea in the parlour with her parents, or the two of them would take sedate walks—weather permitting—but always with her mother and aunt, who lived with the family, bringing up the rear. They had never been alone before their wedding day. Not once. He’d barely held her hand.

  A barn owl screeched somewhere in the night, shattering the peace and quiet, but within moments all was silent again.

  Their wedding night had been a nightmare, and she had made him feel a brute even when he had just tried to hold her. After two months, when the marriage had still been unconsummated, her mother had come to the house on his request and talked to Christabel. After this his wife had allowed a certain degree of intimacy, but once their son was conceived had declared ‘that nasty kind of thing’ was over for good. He’d finally had to accept that he’d married a woman who was not only frigid, but lazy, spoilt and selfish into the bargain. She hadn’t lifted a finger to help his mother in the house, had insisted on travelling about the countryside visiting her friends in the horse and trap every day, and had flatly refused to have anything to do with their son once he was born. If he’d objected, she’d gone hysterical.

  It had been shortly after one of her jaunts that she’d complained of feeling unwell. Within three week
s the scarlet fever had claimed her life, and their son had followed a week later. He had been just three months old.

  Luke lifted his face to the sky, the anguish as real as when he had carried the tiny white coffin from the church to the cemetery. He’d watched his son being laid to rest in the same grave which held the body of his wife, and he had wanted to snatch him up and shout to the mourners that there would be no comfort for the baby with his mother. That Christabel hadn’t wanted him, had refused to feed him, insisting she had no milk, had barely even held him in his short life and had finally been responsible for his death. That his son’s wet nurse and grandmother had been more of a mother to the child than Christabel.

  But of course he hadn’t. Christabel’s parents had been half demented with grief as it was, and his mother had been pitiful to see that day. So he had held his tongue, and his bitterness had been all the more profound for it.

  He swung his body round, looking down to the dim shadow of the cottage wherein Connie was sleeping. He had sworn that day at his son’s graveside that he would never allow himself to become another woman’s fool. He was done with love—if such a thing existed. Which he doubted. Never again would a woman hold him in the hollow of her hand and lead him on until he gave her his name. Never again. Nothing was worth that.

  He began to walk towards the farmhouse, the faint smell of the bonfire two of his labourers had made earlier, when they had been clearing a section of woodland and cutting logs for fuel for the next few months, giving the cold air a timeless fragrance. He sucked it into his lungs, relishing its bite.

  This was real. He pictured the rolling fields and woodland, the low scrub hedges, drystone walls and outcrops of rock and shale shelves that made up his domain to the boundary of the land he owned. The earth, the air you breathed. He was master here. He gave orders and they were obeyed. He was in control. And it would remain that way.

  He approached the house with measured steps, his face cold and set, and he did not glance towards the silent cottage deep in the shadows of the night again.

  Being made a fool of once was one thing. Every man was allowed to make one mistake. But to repeat the exercise…That bordered on insanity. His life was now set in order once again, and it ticked along fairly well on the whole. The seasons came and went, the farm prospered, and he was answerable to no man. Or woman.

  He opened the farmhouse door but paused, glancing across his land, as somewhere in the far distance the owl hooted again.

  He was content. His eyes narrowed. As content as he ever would be. And with that he shut the door.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CONNIE sat quietly, her hands in her lap, gazing into the glowing fire, her mind and senses still touched with the wonder she’d felt ever since arriving in what she privately termed heaven on earth. She still found it hard to believe they were really here.

  It was Christmas Eve, and for the first time in a week it wasn’t snowing. Flora and the three boys had gone into the wood with their next-door neighbour’s wife, Rose, a warm, comely soul, to dig up one of the small fir trees growing there. They were an old couple—older than her parents, at least—but they had taken an interest in the younger ones from day one, and Connie was grateful for it. Rose was going to help Flora and the lads decorate the tree with pine cones they were planning to paint in bright colours. She had told them she’d done this with her own children when they were young, and little Ronnie had made himself sick with excitement the night before. Even Tommy hadn’t been able to sleep.

  She liked Jacob and Rose. She liked all Mr Hudson’s men and their wives. Everyone had been so kind to them. So welcoming.

  Connie’s gaze left the fire and moved to the shining black-leaded hob, an oven to the right of it and a nook for pans to its left. She was sitting in a shabby but comfortable armchair which was one of two set either side of the range, divided by an enormous thick clippy mat where her brothers liked to sit of an evening, toasting their toes on the fender.

  The kitchen also held a table, with two long benches either side of it, a rickety dresser against the far wall and her mother’s rocking chair. And in the tiny scullery leading off it an old tin bath stood on its side, with a large bowl on a stout stool used for all purposes that required water. Two bedrooms, each with a double bed and a chest of drawers, made up the rest of the three-roomed cottage—a cottage Connie could still hardly believe was their home. With no rent man knocking on the door either.

  If she and the rest of them worked for Mr Hudson every day for the rest of their lives they would never be able to repay him for all he’d done for them. She had been more ill than she had realised and he’d saved them. He was a kind man, so kind.

  Here Connie’s thoughts gave a little hiccup, and as though to repudiate something she said out loud, ‘He is. He’s so kind.’

  She stood up, walking over to the kitchen window and peering out into the snow-covered world outside. The hard frost which had fallen the night before was holding, coating everything with a film of silver which sparkled in the weak morning sunshine. She would have loved to go out with the others in the fresh biting air, tramping through the snow and making sport, but she knew she wasn’t well enough for that yet. Hopefully it wouldn’t be long.

  Sighing, she wandered to the kitchen table and sat down, beginning to scrape the potatoes for their evening meal. Until this last week, when she had begun to feel much better, Mr Hudson’s mother had brought their dinner in each night, but she was glad this was no longer so. She was longing to be able to help in the farmhouse and dairy, and start to earn her keep. She’d felt such a burden to Mrs Hudson these last weeks. And to him.

  Her hands stilling, she stared into space. He had never said anything, of course, but the way he was, so distant and cold, made her feel he had regretted bringing them here almost since day one. Or was it her he didn’t like? She frowned to herself. She had watched him on the occasions he had called by, and he wasn’t so chilly with Flora and the boys. Tommy and David and Ronnie had been full of the fact yesterday that he had stopped a while to have a snowball fight with them and the other children of his employees, once they had all finished clearing and sweeping the paths and doing some odd jobs for his mother.

  A knock at the door brought her head swinging round, and as she called, ‘Come in,’ and stood to her feet her heart began to pound—even as she told herself it didn’t necessarily have to be him.

  It was, though. As he filled the aperture her heart beat even faster. Sometimes when he called by he was in his working clothes because, as Rose had put it, ‘The master isn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty,’ and was known as a man who liked to be out of doors. Other times, like now, he dressed as befitted a well-to-do farmer of a large and thriving farm. The thick dark brown tweed coat was three-quarter’s length, and cut in such a way that the powerful shoulders looked even broader, and his trousers and shining leather boots were clearly of the best quality. He was holding his hat in his hands and the jet-black hair had a sheen to it.

  ‘Good morning.’ He glanced round the room. ‘All by yourself on such a beautiful Christmas Eve morning? The others out?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ All the labourers and their wives and the farm children called him master, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do that—possibly because it had been her father’s boast that he had never dipped his cap or bent his knee and called a man master, poor as they were. He had been a proud man, her da, and that had mattered a great deal to him.

  He nodded, but didn’t come into the room. She had known he wouldn’t. He never did if she was alone.

  ‘Rose has kindly taken Flora and the lads to fetch one of the small fir trees,’ she said quietly. ‘They’re going to decorate it later. The lads are half mad with excitement. They’ve never done anything like it before.’

  ‘Not even when your parents were alive?’

  She shook her head. There had been no time or energy for things like that, although she and her mam had tried to make sure the
younger ones always had an orange and an apple and a sugar mouse Christmas morning, to make the day special. One Christmas Eve, before Ronnie was born, her father had managed to get a big fat turkey from the old market at gone midnight, when the last of the stallholders was packing up. The stallholder had haggled at first, but when her father had held out the few coppers he’d saved the man had suddenly relented, muttering something about it being Christmas as he’d shoved the turkey into her father’s arms. That had been a lovely Christmas. She missed her mam and da.

  Whether something of her thoughts showed in her face she didn’t know, but to Connie’s great surprise he pulled the door shut and came fully into the kitchen, saying, ‘You must have found it hard after they went. Weren’t you ever tempted to put the children in the care of the guardians and just fend for yourself?’

  ‘The workhouse?’ She stared at him. ‘Have you ever seen inside that place?’ And then, realising her tone wasn’t what it should be to her employer, she added, ‘Sir.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. But they would have been provided with accommodation and food, surely?’

  ‘Along with the stigma of being workhouse brats and more degradations besides. They would probably have been split up and—’ She stopped. He would never understand, never, but when she had gone with her mother to visit one of their old neighbours the hideous uniform of the female inmates and the smell of the infirm ward had made her sick all night. The foul-smelling atmosphere, the silent misery, the way families were separated had left her deeply shaken. ‘I would never have let them go there after what I saw,’ she finished flatly.