She forgot her misgivings, however, when a stir at the rear of the church heralded the arrival of the bride and Elinor entered on her father’s arm, a little wisp of a thing, in a white muslin gown, with a Honiton lace veil embroidered with true lover’s knots held in place by an evergreen wreath. Edwin Willoughby looked very solemn as the two walked the length of the aisle and Will, nudged by his groomsman, jumped up with a clatter of boots and looked around helplessly, as though expecting to be told what to do next. Help was at hand, for Elinor, half lifting her veil, smiled at him reassuringly and it was her smile that touched Mrs Handcock as it did every other woman in the church. She looked so fragile, so pretty and yet so confident of her destiny.
After that the ceremony went off very smoothly, responses being uttered in voices that contained an element of defiance, and when the couple walked down the aisle to the chapel door, where they were showered with clammy handfuls of confetti by the Coombe Bay folk waiting outside, there was a general sense of anti-climax. Paul kissed Elinor on the cheek and shook hands with a beaming Will, who seemed almost dazed with relief that nothing had occurred to shame him or spoil the occasion for Elinor. There was no reception; the couple simply drove back to Deepdene in a hired Coombe Bay gig and the bride’s father followed in his trap and everybody stood about in the wind until Paul, sensing that something was expected of him, issued a general invitation to everyone to join him at The Raven and drink the young couple’s health in beer or cider. Mrs Handcock whispered urgently, ‘Now, dornee indulge ’em, Mr Craddock!’ but she came along nevertheless and drank tea with Minnie Flowers, the landlord’s wife, in the kitchen, whilst Paul entertained the groomsman, Walt Pascoe, and a dozen others in the bar. It was Walt, feeling himself half initiated in the mysteries of bridal rites, who expressed general disappointment with the ceremony when he said, cheerfully, ‘Well here’s your health, Squire, but ’twas all a bit of damp squib, wasn’t ’er? I would ha’ wagered half-a-sovereign to sixpence old Arabella would ha’ sailed in and set about poor old Will with her umbrella, but ’er must have been tied to a chair last minute by Martin!’ This was received as a great joke, Martin Codsall being recognised as the most hagridden husband in the Valley, yet there was a grain of truth in Walt’s guess after all. Arabella had certainly intended making good her threat and it was Martin who had, in fact, prevented her.
Word had reached Arabella that the wedding was timed for 2 p.m. and at one o’clock she came into the kitchen dressed in her high-buttoned best with elastic-sided boots and a huge fruit hat, a kind of horned cornucopia made of hard, black straw and glutted with plums and grapes and cherries, that swung like so many coloured bells when she turned her head. Martin, also in his Sunday clothes, awaited her, having spent the entire morning in earnest attempts to dissuade her from disgracing the family. Arabella knew Martin well but not so well as she imagined, or she might have noted his unnaturally high colour, as though the wretchedness of providing a public spectacle and destroying the last bridge between him and his firstborn was already bringing blushes to his cheeks. He was unusually neat and tidy too, even for churchgoing, his greying hair damped down and his gold pin and boots twinkling in the firelight. He remained silent when Arabella consulted her bodice watch, saying that it was time to go if they were to arrive at the chapel in good time, but as they seated themselves in the high-slung trap he made a final appeal to her dignity, saying, ‘Then youm still bent on every layabout in the Valley laughing their silly heads off over us, Mother?’, but all she replied was, ‘The sooner we get there the sooner it’ll be over an’ done with!’
‘But damme,’ he protested, ‘it won’t do a particle a good to any one of us! Do ’ee think this kind o’ caper will fetch our Will back?’
‘No, I don’t,’ she said calmly, ‘but it’ll make a fool of ’im an’ shame her and that’s all I care about at this stage!’
It was all he cared about too, and it tilted him into mutiny. She had not noticed that Flick, their sedate and ageing pony, was not harnessed to the trap or that Cobber, a recently acquired cob of doubtful sobriety, had taken Flick’s place between the shafts. He was surprised that she had not connected upon this when they came out and even had an excuse on the tip of his tongue but he put her poor observation down to the cloud of spite that had settled on her brain. Saying no more he cracked the whip as the trap moved off down the track to the bridge at a spanking pace, the measured gavotte of Arabella’s cherries and plums changing to a brisk polka and then a reckless can-can, as the cob lengthened its stride and bumped over the ruts at twelve miles per hour. ‘At this rate,’ thought Martin, grimly, ‘us’ll be in Coombe Bay in under the half-hour, providin’ we’m going to Coombe Bay this afternoon!’
The first indication that Arabella had of his treachery was when the trap shot across the plank bridge and swung left instead of right, taking the river road that ran under the slope of Priory Wood. She was so astonished that for a few moments she could find no words to comment and this, for Arabella Codsall, implied a very great degree of astonishment indeed. Then it occurred to her that Martin must be so emotionally disturbed that he had forgotten his way to the coast, so she shrieked, ‘Fool! Pull him up, and turn him round!’, but instead of obeying Martin lifted his whip and brought it slashing down across the cob’s haunches, and the cob, already going at a rolling canter, threw up its head and moved from canter to gallop, almost pitching Arabella over the seat rail and causing her to let out a sustained scream that startled every bird in the Valley. She realised then that he had gone mad, for only madness could explain open revolt and she realised too, with a coolness that did her credit in the circumstances, that if they continued in this direction at this pace they would soon pass a point where it would be impossible to retrace their steps in time for the wedding. The thought submerged her fears so that she made a wild grab at the reins, but madness upon madness, Martin switched them to his right hand and fended her off with the butt end of the whip, so that she suddenly abandoned all thought of the wedding in certainty that he was bent on oversetting the trap and killing her and himself. She began to plead, holding tight to the rail with one hand and keeping her fruit hat from flying away with the other. The hat, in fact, was beginning to disintegrate, and cherries were already cascading into her lap. A plum or a large grape, also worked itself loose but this went unnoticed, striking her shoulder and shooting into the back of the trap among some sacks.
The cob was now at stretched gallop, and on the uneven surface of the road the trap was bumping from side to side like a hay trailer, coupled to a recklessly driven waggon. Martin concentrated on preventing the hubs of the wheels touching the bank on one side or the flood posts on the other but Arabella had nothing to do but hang on and scream and this she did, shriek upon shriek issuing from her mouth in an almost continuous sound that sent every river bird wheeling from the reeds and caused a curious buzzard, watching from an elevation of three hundred feet, to back up against the wind currents until it could decide what was happening on the ribbon of road below.
Then, as the cob saw the freedom of the moor before him, he shot off along the upland track that was not even as well surfaced as the river road and suddenly, to cap all, a shower of sleet came down, driving into their faces and tearing Arabella’s hat from her grasp, so that she stopped screaming and began to plead but all Martin did was to lay on with his whip and the cob, that had been enjoying the outcry until now, panicked and swerved, shooting off into heather and then back again but without varying its frightful pace across the moor.
It was when they came to a gradient where neither whip, shouts, nor rattle could induce the blown cob to maintain its pace that the trap slowed to an uncertain walk but Arabella hardly noticed the change. She was sobbing and breathless, her unpinned hair obscuring her vision, her lovely fruit hat a sodden bundle half-a-mile back along the road, her mind tormented by the prospect of living out the remainder of her days with a lunatic husband. The sleet st
ill came at them like a shower of spears but he paid no heed to it, sitting hunched over the footboard, reins and whip in hand, eyes fixed on the crest of the moor ahead.
‘Well, Mother,’ he said at length, ‘I reckon that does it! Us couldn’t get to chapel in time now if us went there behind racehorses so put up your hair and make the best of it! Us’ll take it easy going backalong!’
She stopped wheezing then and glared at him through a matted screen of hair, for clearly he was not mad after all. Incredibly he had done this terrible thing deliberately, a crafty, premeditated manoeuvre, aimed at cheating her of her revenge. She said, softly and murderously, ‘I’ll make you pay for this, Martin Codsall! As God is me judge, I’ll make you pay!’ but her threat did not disturb him unduly for he reflected, whilst turning the trap and heading back to the river road, that he had already paid all he had or was likely to have and what profit was there in plaguing a bankrupt?
Barely a mile from the spot on the edge of the moor, where Martin Codsall had turned the trap earlier in the day, his son and daughter-in-law were using the fading light to make the Priory farmhouse habitable. It was not really a farmhouse at all but a largish cottage, still half a ruin. Will and Elinor, helped by the biblical twins, Matt and Luke, had retimbered and rethatched the roof, and had also given the whole place a thorough scouring but their main efforts had been directed to the outhouses, for, as Will had put in on the day he had first taken Elinor there, ‘Us can only live in one room at a time and us must have somewhere for the livestock when the weather zets in.’ Now, on their owners’ wedding night, a fat sow and her litter were snug in the small sty and two dozen saddlebacks were snoring in the big sty, while Gertie, the Alderney, old Willoughby’s wedding gift, occupied a byre that was rather more comfortable than the farm kitchen where some of the broken windows were plugged with cardboard. Bride and groom made light of discomfort, however, for it seemed to them a very wonderful thing to be alone in a house of their own and as soon as they had changed they borrowed Willoughby’s trap and drove over the moor in the teeth of the storm, stabling the horse in the ramshackle stable and lighting a roaring fire from sawn timber left over from the repairs. By the time it was dark and the lamp was lit, the kitchen began to look like a home although there was nothing on the stone floor but a rush mat and only a single wooden chair beside the open hearth, where Elinor had set a rickety table and the milking stool left by the Hardcastles. Fortunately Hardcastle’s widow had also bequeathed them other pieces that had not been considered worth the trouble of hauling away after the funeral. Upstairs, in the now rainproof main bedroom, was a rusty iron bedstead, already neatly made with Elinor’s hoarded linen, a chest of drawers warped by damp and a cracked sheet of backed glass for use as a mirror. In the scullery was a built-in dresser, with a few chipped cups and plates which would do for the time being for all their savings, including the Squire’s sovereign wedding gift, had been laid out on pigs and winter feed.
About six o’clock Elinor called Will from the stairs, where he was replacing rotted boards and she might have been married years rather than hours judged by the casual way she summoned him to his meal and sat him on the only chair whilst she took the stool and began to ladle generous helpings of thick vegetable stew into which he dipped bread she had baked that same morning. They ate in silence and while they were occupied in everyday habits—eating, firemending, washing up under the scullery pump—they were neither shy nor withdrawn. It was only later, when Elinor carried the stone hot-water bottle upstairs to air the lavender-scented linen she had brought as her portion, that the fearful wonder of the situation touched her and she took the opportunity, whilst he was finishing his carpentry, of slipping out of her clothes and pausing for a moment in front of the cracked mirror to study herself in the light of the candle. She was not sure that she liked what she saw, a small, girlish body, with honey-coloured plaits almost as thick as her wrists screening her small, hard breasts. ‘Well,’ she mused, ‘I wonder if he’ll like me now he’s got me?’ and then, doubtfully but not altogether apprehensively, ‘and I wonder if he’ll use me roughly, as he tried to often enough in the old days?’ She already thought of their courtship as ‘the old days’, belonging to the distant past but she no longer feared Mrs Codsall’s sourness or persecution. She was done with Four Winds and so, praise God, was Will! The few words, spoken by the red-haired preacher from Whinmouth, had banished Mrs Codsall and all her works so that nobody, not even King Edward himself, could separate them now and the certainty of this warmed her belly and thighs, reaching to the tips of her little toes on the bare boards at the foot of the bed. She pushed the stone water bottle to ‘his side’ and stood holding her long flannel nightdress against herself, fearful and expectant, yet somehow safe and rooted. Then she put the candle down on the box beside the bed and unlatched the door, calling to him as he knelt, hammering in the light of a storm-lamp hooked to the banister.
‘Will,’ she said, ‘I’m going to bade now, unless you’ll be wanting anything more.’
‘No, midear,’ he called back, ‘I’ll damp the vire and come on up. Tiz a botchy ole job in this kind o’ light!’
The mildness of his voice reassured her, banishing the last of her fears and she went back into the bedroom, folded her nightgown and placed it under his pillow, for he had told her some time ago that he liked to ‘sleep high’ and the only pillows they had were two ratty old cushions, loaned by Aunt Mary. Then she got into bed and inhaled the lavender scent, reaching out and touching the space where he would lie and finding it well-warmed by the bottle. He came in holding the storm lantern high and looked down on her with a great, broad smile, the first she had seen on his face that day.
‘Ah, youm lovely, Elinor,’ he said, ‘and I dorn know what I done to deserve ’ee!’
‘Youm a lovely gurt thing yourself, Will,’ she told him, ‘and never let no one tell you different! Make haste man and blow thicky candle out!’
IV
Winter entered the valley like a white nun, austerely beautiful but pitiless, glorifying in mortification of the flesh and calling upon men to face realities.
Young Henry Pitts, of Hermitage, saw winter not as a nun, however, but as a malevolent clown who got under his feet and threw him headlong on the steep path to the sties, who clothed his Guernseys in their breath and sent them mincing over iced ruts to frozen pools, who sealed the very gate latches with ice and threatened his winter corn, sown with so much effort in early autumn. For the snow reached Hermitage first, moving in from the north-east and the heavy flakes floated rather than fell, each being set down gently and individually by a wind that had carried them all the way from the Russian steppes. Then, having frozen the imperishable grin on Henry’s rubbery face, winter moved south-west, scattering diamonds across the Codsall stubble, slowing the Sorrel current, sealing its oxbow and stiffening its rushes, until it plucked at Martin Codsall’s long nose as he stood cursing the clumsiness of his new cowman and declaring that Will had emptied udders in half the time taken by his replacement. Then the frost doubled to strike the Home Farm, silencing the sawmill and reminding the shepherd twins, Matt and Luke, that the lambing season was not far off and if snow fell now it might go hard with them in February. Down at the foot of the Coombe the snow lay lightly but the wind was just as keen and Meg and her thinly clad daughters shivered in their leaking kitchen and wash-house. Only Tamer, with over sixteen stone of blubber to protect him, could sneer at the sky and waddle across his turnip fields wondering who would do his spring sowing now that Squire had deprived him of Sam.
Higher up the Dell, where soon nobody could distinguish between Potter’s broken fences and the tiny hedgerows of Farmer Willoughby, drifts began to pile where the timber was sparse and Willoughby’s hired man, plodding about Elinor’s business in the henhouses, wondered glumly why the birds resented Elinor’s abdication so much that they had gone into a mass moult. Mary still kept her school, for the Valley child
ren were a hardy lot and as long as the river road was open continued to ride or walk to their morning lessons. There was a warm stove in the schoolroom and a long row of hooks over it to dry mittens and gaiters, and always, sharp at ten-thirty, cocoa for every scholar, even those banished to corners and wearing dunces’ caps.
On the bleak upland of Derwent’s holding tempers were sharper than the frost, for Edward Derwent sorely missed Claire and Rose was worried about her horses, realising there could be no hunting this side of New Year. Even at exercise the snow balled under shoes and brought animals down, so that they spent most of their time in loose boxes, eating the season’s profits.
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 24
