Feathers in the Fire

by Catherine Cookson

  ‘Yes, leastways, he was.’ He wagged his head; then said, ‘Miss Jane . . . where is she?’

  ‘In the sitting room, sir, she’s got her feet up. She’s still not herself.’

  She led the way down the stairs and opened the sitting-room door for him, and he entered, saying, ‘Well! well! Jane. Well! well!’ When he took the seat by the side of the couch he looked down and added, ‘This is distressing news, distressing.’

  Jane said nothing. She was in a high state of nerves. She was feeling much worse than she had done in the middle of the night; moreover she was anxious to know his report on Amos; and when he said, ‘I’m afraid your brother is in a very bad way, Jane,’ she still made no comment, simply stared at him wide-eyed, waiting.

  ‘Besides concussion and a dislocated shoulder he has, I’m afraid, seriously injured the bottom of his spine. I suspect it may have affected him internally for he is’ – he hesitated on the word – ‘incontinent at the present moment. This is a bad sign. It may be that he is paralysed from the waist; I cannot make a final examination until he’s fully conscious. I will come back tomorrow and look at him again.’

  ‘He is going to live?’ She made the statement slowly, her eyes in a fixed stare.

  ‘That, too, I cannot say with any certainty at this stage. Now, about you. How do you feel?’

  ‘Not very well, Doctor.’

  ‘No, you don’t look well. Now what you must do is to rest for a few days. I understand from Molly that you’ve had something of a shock. If you can send into the town today I will make up a sedative for you, if not I will bring it tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Now just rest; you need rest.’ He got to his feet. ‘Well, I must be on my way, but remember, Jane, you must rest.’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’

  He stooped and patted her head as if she were a child; then straightening his creaking back he bade her good day, and she answered, ‘Good day, Doctor.’

  A few minutes later Molly came back into the room saying, ‘Well, that part’s over.’

  ‘He didn’t question about his falling?’

  ‘No, I just told him what we said I should.’

  ‘What will happen when he regains consciousness? He might tell the doctor it was Davie.’

  ‘You leave that to Davie; let’s meet the trouble as it comes.’

  ‘If . . . if he lives he’ll need nursing, Molly.’

  ‘Aye, aye, he will.’ Molly was replenishing the fire now, and she had her back to Jane as she spoke.

  ‘It isn’t fair to ask you to do it.’

  Molly thrust the poker through the lower bars and raked vigorously. It was on the point of her tongue to retort, ‘There’s nothing fair in this world, Miss,’ but she checked it and made herself say, ‘Don’t worry your head about that.’ She now dusted one hand against the other and picking up the empty scuttle and saying, ‘Lie quiet,’ she went out.

  She did not go straight through the kitchen and into the yard to fill the scuttle but put it down by the side of the wide hearth and stood looking at the black pot on the fire, which held a meat pudding she had made an hour ago.

  During the past few hours she had laid out old Sep, she had stripped the clothes from that one upstairs, cleaned the filth from him and changed his bed. She had cooked the breakfast, prepared the dinner, tried to get Miss Jane to eat something, but instead had to hold her head while she vomited. It was this last that hurt her most, for this wasn’t the first time that Miss Jane had vomited in the morning. She wondered if she knew what was wrong with her. She wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t. She was guileless. Living on a farm where conceiving and birth were as common as God bless you, she had somehow never been part of it.

  She reached up and laid her forearms crossways on the mantelshelf and rested her head on them. It was a favourite position of hers when she wanted to think. But now she was past thinking, she was tired. Her body was crying out for sleep, and her heart was crying out for something she would never have in this world.

  She let out a high squawk as the hand came on her shoulder, and Davie had to steady her or else she would have fallen into the fire.

  ‘You . . . you were half asleep, didn’t you hear me come in?’ He still had hold of her and she gazed at him through her blinking lids while he looked down at her. They stood like this for a full minute, and some quality in the look in his eyes which she had never seen there before made her weak, so much so that she put her hand back and grabbed at the chair. When she sat on it he still kept his hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re all in,’ he said. ‘It’s too much to expect. You’ve been on your feet for weeks now, what with the old ’un an’ one thing and another, and I’m . . . I’m not ungrateful, Molly, I’m not.’

  Again they were staring at each other, when he said, ‘Jane’s just told me what the doctor had to say, but as long as he lives I’ll help you tend him, you can’t do it alone. One thing we mustn’t do, and that’s let her go near him. Not that she will want to, she’s scared to death of him now. She won’t say exactly what happened, but I’ve got me own opinion on that, an’ it makes me sick.’

  Her head came forward; she pulled herself away from the chair and his hand; then going towards the side of the fireplace she picked up the empty scuttle and made for the door. The latch in her hand, she turned and looked at him and said quietly, ‘Talkin’ about being sick, did she tell you she’s been sick in the mornings? It might only be a nervous stomach, but then it mightn’t. But you should know.’

  BOOK FIVE

  1899

  One

  Davie stood by the side of the bed, not too near it; he did not want to grapple with the one good hand Amos had left. But he let his glance rest on it for a moment. The fingers were plucking the bedcover as if they were thinning out tow. The left shoulder was mending but the rest of him would never mend, so the doctor said. He was now paralysed from the waist. It was a terrible predicament for any human being to be in, yet he couldn’t pity him. He was but a young lad of nineteen, broken in what body he had and twisted in mind. Forgetting all his past deeds, even the one against himself, and that had been mean, for to plant six pieces of jewellery under the mattress of a dying man took some beating; even so, his present condition should call on his compassion, but it didn’t for he was still wary of him, still suspicious of him and the power of his mind. The power showed in his face when his eyes fixed you with that dense stare; you had to use your will not to drop your gaze away from them, not to allow the jerking in your stomach to pass like a tremor through you.

  He watched the strong white teeth come slowly apart, and then Amos was asking slowly, ‘Do you sleep in the house?’

  ‘Yes, I sleep in the house, and have done for the past month.’

  ‘You have no right, you will go back to your cottage.’

  There was a short silence while they stared at each other. Then Davie, his tone in levelness matching that of Amos’, said, ‘I have no intention of returnin’ to the cottage, now or at any other time. For the rest of me life I am stayin’ in this house; I am marrying Jane the morrow.’

  The hand stopped plucking the eiderdown and formed itself into a fist. ‘You can’t. You won’t. You daren’t. Do you hear me? You daren’t.’ He raised the upper part of his body from the bed by lifting one shoulder and resting on his elbow, and his head craned forward as he yelled, ‘You can’t do this, do you hear? You won’t, and I can stop you. When Cargill comes I’ll tell him how I got this. It was you, you threw me down the stairs.’

  ‘Do that. You do that’ – Davie nodded at him – ‘and I’ll tell him and . . . and the Judges an’ all that I came in answer to your sister’s screams when you were trying to rape her.’

  ‘That’s a lie.’

  ‘Well, say it’s a lie, say you intended that for future use, there’s st
ill the little matter of Parson Hedley conveniently put out of the way the night before he was going to marry your sister, and Jane would explain how you did it. Then there’s the other matter of your father’s end. Molly would have a lot to say about that. Anything you could say against me wouldn’t help your case at all. Nor would the predicament that you’re in now. There are prison hospitals where men end their days, an’ I would see you taken there without blinking an eyelid, so . . . so think on it. You’ve got a choice, you can rest comfortable here until you die, or you can pay for what you’ve done, it’s up to you.’

  In one movement Amos fell back on his pillow while his hand went out and gripped the heavy glass water jug from the side table, and as quickly Davie’s voice came barking at him, ‘You do! Just you do and I’ll punch your lugs for you until your face is twice the size it is now.’

  They glared at each other for a long moment. Then Davie turned and made for the door; but stopped before he reached it and, glancing over his shoulder, said, ‘One more thing. You be civil to Molly or I’ll see you lie in your muck. And that’s no idle threat.’ And on this he went out. But once on the landing the stiffness went out of his shoulders and as he walked down the four steps on to the lower landing and to the room that was now his, his whole body slumped.

  Seating himself in the high-backed leather chair near the window, he let out a long slow breath; then half aloud he said, ‘He can’t do anything. Anyway what could he do? He won’t tell the doctor, so what can he do?’

  No answer came to his mind, yet no reassurance that nothing could happen before tomorrow when Jane would be his wife and together they would sleep in that bed.

  His head actually nodded towards the bed, the bed in which McBain had slept; the bed in which the first night he had been in this room had refused him rest of any kind. He had thought at one time that McBain himself was in the mattress prodding him into wakefulness, trying to kick him out. In the end he had got up and dozed in this chair by the window.

  He looked out of the window now down on to the paved court and the arch that led into the main yard, then over the garden towards where, in the far distance, was the cow path above the malt house. Tomorrow, by law through his wife, he should be master of all this, this house that had been like a star to him in his youth, and, like a star, just as unreachable. But as it was he’d be playing at master, for the owner was still alive, the mind alert in a mangled body, and, as things stood, he’d be quite capable of willing everything away from Jane, even though it was mortgaged up to the hilt and beyond.

  At this point there came to him a clear understanding of the desire that had driven Amos to get rid of those who stood in his path. He rose abruptly from the chair and went downstairs.

  Two

  The morning was bright; there was a tang about that promised winter; the trees in the copse were tinged with brown, some leaves having already fallen; the sky was high and cloudless, and the air caught at the throat like a sharp wine.

  Jane stood in the hall, with Molly beside her. They were both pale. Molly was wearing a clean holland apron, the side of which she crumpled in her hand one minute and smoothed down the next. After a while she said, ‘You look bonny.’ She did not add ‘Miss Jane’.

  ‘Thank you, Molly; but . . . but I don’t feel bonny.’

  ‘Well, you are. Blue’s your colour, and corduroy always looks cosy. Mrs Bennett made a good job of that although her hands are not what they used to be.’

  ‘Yes, I think she made it very well.’

  Now Jane smoothed down the front of her three-quarter-length corduroy coat with its matching skirt and, her head lowered, she said, ‘I’d feel much happier if I thought I wasn’t going to lose you.’

  ‘We can’t have everything in this life.’

  Jane’s head was brought up sharply by the tone and she stared at Molly whose face was now suffused by a deep blush. ‘What I mean is, Miss Jane, you’ll be married an’ you’ll have Davie, and Will has promised to look after him.’ She jerked her head upward. ‘He said he won’t mind doing that, ’specially with winter coming on, it’ll keep him out of the weather. Will knows when he’s on a good thing, an’ Davie will get another man. We’ve been into it, haven’t we?’

  ‘Yes, Molly, we’ve been into it. When are you going to see Mr Bateman?’

  ‘Oh well; this afternoon, maybe, I’ll take a walk over.’

  ‘You can’t walk all that way; Davie’ll take you in the trap.’

  ‘He’ll do no such thing.’

  There was the tone again that brought them looking at each other in silence. Then Jane said apologetically, ‘Well, I only thought, it being on six miles . . . ’

  ‘Aw, what’s six miles?’ Molly was looking down at her hands twisting her apron once more. ‘Do me good to stretch me legs. I’ll have to stretch them longer than that to keep running after that squad.’ She gave a nervous laugh; then they both turned and looked at the stairs which Davie was descending, a new-looking Davie, a slightly awkward-looking Davie.

  And he felt awkward in his new clothes; he had never worn such a light colour before, nor yet such tight trousers. The suit was made of tweed and the clothier in Newcastle had promised him it would last a lifetime. That, he had remarked to himself, remained to be seen; a little more weight and he wouldn’t be able to get into it.

  As he looked down at Jane waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs he felt he should apologise, for things were in their wrong order; it was the man who should be waiting for the woman. But he had been up since first light this morning seeing to the cattle; afterwards he had taken a bath in the closet room. He had humped the hot water up from the kitchen and for the first time in his life he had been immersed all over at one go with warm water. He had stayed too long in it and had then to scurry.

  ‘Well then, we’re ready for off?’ He screwed his chin upwards out of his shirt collar – he wasn’t used to anything so tight round his neck – then he pulled his white shirt cuffs well below his grey coat sleeves, and Jane, looking at him with love-filled eyes, replied, ‘Yes, Davie, we’re ready for off.’ Molly said nothing.

  They walked out of the hall, Jane going first, he following, and Molly coming up in the rear. They went on to the drive where the trap stood, Amos’ trap, the seats altered, the low steps taken off the back. It was a gig to be proud of.

  As he went to hand Jane up into the trap she turned impulsively to Molly and, catching her hands, said, ‘I wish you were coming, Molly. I do. Oh, I do.’

  Molly seemed to find difficulty in answering; then she said, ‘I’m where I’m needed most, Miss; Mickey and his wife can both write and that’s all that’s needed, just to sign their names.’

  Jane shook her head slowly before turning quickly and getting into the trap.

  Davie, his foot on the step, paused and looked at Molly, and she at him. For one long moment they looked at each other and the years fell away and they were walking through the fields again, both chewing rose hips, and when their shoulders touched they bounced from each other like rubber balls and laughed.

  Now he bounced up into the trap, and it rocked like a boat.

  ‘Gee-up there! Gee-up there!’

  The pony trotted smartly out of the yard and when, going through the gate, Jane turned to wave to Molly she saw that the yard was empty.

  In the kitchen Molly stood with her back to the stout oak door. She had her thumb thrust deep into her mouth and was biting on it so hard that she could scarcely endure the pain. But it was either that or giving way, and that must wait, she didn’t want to face them at their breakfast with red eyes. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction, and she wouldn’t upset Miss Jane, or Mrs Armstrong as she’d be in an hour’s time. What she must do, she told herself, was to go and clean that one up, and that would keep her occupied and her mind off herself; her mind couldn’t wander wh
en she was seeing to him.

  As she opened the bedroom door he raised himself on his elbow and cried at her, ‘You’ve taken your time. Didn’t you hear me shout?’

  ‘Aye, I heard you, but I’ve been busy.’

  ‘Busy! I’m your first concern to be busy about.’

  ‘Now you watch it!’ She nodded her head at him as she stripped off the top cover. ‘Keep that up and I’ll leave you lying in it.’

  He sank back into the bed and lay gasping for a moment; then closing his eyes, he asked her in an entirely different tone, ‘Have you any idea how I feel lying here?’

  She glanced sharply at him, then said nonchalantly, ‘No; how could I, not being you?’

  ‘That’s the point, not being me, you couldn’t understand what it’s like. Molly’ – he put out his hand towards her – ‘I . . . I want to see Jane. He won’t listen to me.’ It was odd that Davie had now become HE. ‘I promised him I wouldn’t upset her. I . . . I just want to see her, just to have a word. Look, Molly, I’m sorry if I’ve gone for you, I am, I really am.’ He gazed at her, his slant eyes soft. ‘Ask him, will you? Just for a minute. She needn’t come near me, just so’s . . . so’s I can see her. I’ll go mad, more mad than I am now. Yes, I will. I’ll go stark raving mad lying here seeing only you and him. I loathe him, do you know that, Molly? I loathe and hate him, and I used to like him, almost love him. But now I hate him even more than I did my father. God! how I hate him!’

  She stopped stripping the bed and stared at him, and for a second she felt so sorry for him she almost put her arms around him. He looked like a very young lad on the verge of tears. After all, as he said, it was terrible lying there, helpless, seeing only her and Davie and the doctor. He was at their mercy, so to speak, and it must go against the grain with a character like his that wanted to dominate everyone, that did dominate everybody, crippled as he was.