by Marie Joseph
Adam Page was looking so different from the last time Seth called as to be almost unrecognisable. Then his shirt had food stains down its button-trim, with the muffler knotted loosely round his neck as stringy as a frayed piece of rope. The cottage was different, too. Now the brasses gleamed, the hearth was swept, and from the appetising smell Seth guessed that a piece of meat was slowly cooking in its own juices.
‘You’ve trimmed your beard,’ he said, trying to give the silent man time to think.
‘Aye.’
‘You’ve got everything looking very nice in here.’
‘Aye.’
‘You’ve obviously got help in since your wife died?’
‘Aye.’
As Seth bent over the dog again, stroking its face and ears, the dry nose nuzzled itself into the palm of his hand.
‘It’s the kindest way, Adam.’
‘I know that, Mr Armstrong.’
‘Well then …?’
Margot Gray listened gravely as Seth told her about the gardener’s dog. She was sorry, of course, but an animal was just an animal when all was said and done. Not a human being, for God’s sake. Harry would see that a replacement was delivered to the cottage as soon as possible.
What she was more interested in was watching Seth’s face as he talked. His eyes were the kindest she had ever seen in a man, almost as if they had a light shining from behind them. His hair was as sun-bleached as if the sun shone down on it every day. Seth Armstrong was a beautiful man. Yes, that was the right word. But to use it to describe him didn’t mean that he was in the least effeminate. Mon Dieu, no! There was a strength in him that almost shouted at you. Quick-tempered, too. She had once seen him snatch the whip off a hired man out in the yard to put a stop to him beating a wretched dog into submission. He had snapped the whip in two as if it had been a mere twig.
She shifted her position on the couch, spreading her skirts more attractively about her. There was nothing more exciting than a handsome man who seemed to be totally unaware of the effect he had on women. A vain man was an abomination, but this man’s open, friendly attitude was almost an insult. Margot pouted. She might as well be another man, for heaven’s sake!
Seth was well aware that Margot Gray was flirting with him. She was waiting for a compliment on her appearance, and she’d get one in due course. They always played this game together when they met. If he hadn’t thought that her marriage was as solid as Pendle rock …
‘I can never quite decide on the colour of your eyes, Margot,’ he said. ‘Hazel? Amber? What colour would you say they were?’
Margot fluttered her eyelashes. ‘They are whatever colour you would like them to be,’ she whispered, tilting her head to avoid him noticing her double chin. ‘Seth, dear Seth. Why have you never married again?’
At once his expression darkened, so that she knew her light-hearted teasing had gone too far. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re so wasted, so terribly wasted …’
‘Is my wife proposing to you again?’ Harry rubbed his hands together as he came into the room, then held them out to the fire. ‘There was no need for you to bury Adam’s dog yourself, Seth old chap. If it was too upsetting for him you should have got one of the stable lads to do it.’ He turned his back to the fire, spread his legs wide. ‘Was he very cut up about it?’
Seth shook his head. ‘It was hard to say what he was feeling. He just wasn’t the same man. It must have something to do with the woman he’s got in to look after him. He looked spruce enough to attend a wedding.’
‘Perhaps he will be going to one before long.’ Margot held out a foot to admire the soft bronze sheen of the pointed-toed shoe. She paused for full dramatic effect. ‘His own.’
‘You mean that young lass?’ Harry laughed out loud. ‘But his wife’s only been dead for … Well, I’ll be danged!’ He moved to the bell-pull at the side of the fireplace. ‘He’s old enough to be a grandfather.’ He gave two tugs at the rope. ‘Not too early for a drink, is it, Armstrong?’
Margot sat forward, not wishing to let the subject go. ‘How old do you think the gardener is, Seth?’
‘Fifty-five? Sixty? It’s hard to tell with most of his face covered in hair.’
‘Early forties,’ Margot said triumphantly. ‘Try and picture him without the undergrowth, and you’ll have a different man altogether. Men with beards always look as if they’ve something to hide.’
Harry had lost interest, but Seth was grinning, enjoying Margot’s pleasure in her little bit of gossip. ‘The girl? What’s she like?’
‘A splendid little …’ Harry stopped in mid-sentence as a swarthy man carrying a silver tray with glasses on it came into the room. ‘Over there,’ he said, indicating a small table by the side of the fireplace. ‘And ask Johnson to come up and see to the fire. It needs more coal.’
Margot could see by the expression on Seth’s face that he couldn’t see why Harry didn’t take the tongs and lift the coal from the scuttle himself, instead of waiting for a maid to do it. That was one of the many things she liked about him. In spite of his obvious good breeding there wasn’t an ounce of snobbishness in him. When Johnson came in to tend the fire Margot saw the way his mouth tightened briefly and his eyes slid away from her struggle with a cob of coal too large for the tongs to take. Yet he wouldn’t intervene, not when he was a guest of the house. How petty and small-minded he must think they were.
‘I think I’ll pay a call on the gardener’s girl one of these days,’ she said, when Johnson had left the room. ‘She probably has no mother to advise her – I’ll talk to her …’
She looked at Seth to see how he was taking this, but he was engrossed in telling Harry something about a cow that had aborted itself twice. She got up and swept from the room, her skirts swishing out behind her.
True to her word, a week later she called at the gardener’s cottage. She was followed up the path by Kit Dailey, the handyman hired by her husband a year ago. A small dark man, he staggered a little beneath the weight of a huge cardboard box filled with jars of preserves.
Margot suspected that she had overdone the Lady Bountiful bit. She was no lady of the manor calling regularly at the cottages in the village wearing a floppy hat, knowing all the children by their names. It smacked of patronage to Margot; it seemed to her to be an intrusion into privacy, and she had told herself many times she would have no part in it. But the gardener’s girl intrigued her, had done so right from the beginning, and the box of preserves was a good excuse to meet and talk with her again.
‘Anyone at home?’ She pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The cottage was charming. Like a cottage in a fairy-tale illustration. The firelight set the brasses twinkling; the blue and white plates on the dresser gleamed as if newly glazed. A small hand sewing-machine stood at one end of the scrubbed table, with scraps of material scattered around. There was a paper of pins, a reel of cotton and a bigger one of white tacking thread. Over the back of a stand-chair a length of scarlet ribbon trailed to the floor.
‘Anyone at home?’ Margot walked to the foot of the stairs. ‘Are you there, Annie? It’s Margot Gray.’
Annie put a hand to her throat. Margot Gray? Mrs Gray from the big house, downstairs in the living-room, with the place looking like a pig-sty. No cloth on the table and the best chair covered in paper patterns! Dropping in uninvited! Oh, dear God! And here she was, half dressed, the front of the bodice pinned and the hem only partly tacked up. Bits of cotton on the floor. No cake in the tin … So flustered she could hardly speak, Annie called out that she was coming and ran downstairs.
At the sight of her Kit Dailey put up a hand and sleeked back his already smooth hair. So this was Adam’s housekeeper. No wonder the old codger was keeping her to himself. No wonder he kept his mouth shut when they asked about her. Compared to the ailing wife this girl was all colour, glowing vivid colour. Compared to Clara Page, this one was the ruddy Fairy Queen!
‘You may
go now, Dailey.’ Margot nodded a dismissal. She smiled at Annie. ‘May I sit down, dear?’
Kit Dailey left them to it, remembering first to touch his forehead in a way that made the gesture look like an insult. ‘You may go now, Dailey. Wait outside.’ Something inside him cringed every time he was spoken to in that way. Why did the possession of money give anyone the right to speak to another human being like that?
He climbed back into the trap and folded his arms. He couldn’t get over the sight of the gardener’s girl and the colour of her. That blue dress and that glorious red hair. He bet the shiny material had cost a bonny penny. How had a young lass persuaded a miser like Adam Page to fork out money like that? Happy as a pig in muck when he got his wages, but nobody had ever seen him spend a brass farthing of it. Kit’s lip curled. Talk about a dark horse. The sly old devil had definitely spruced himself up lately. No tobacco stains down the front of his waistcoat now, whereas not all that long ago you could have stood Adam Page side by side with the scarecrow in the bottom field and not told the difference.
Kit laughed out loud.
To cover her confusion, Annie was now talking nineteen to the dozen.
‘Mr Page gave me the money to buy a new dress, but I went on the market for a good look round and got two dress lengths and this second-hand machine for the same money.’
Margot made a small circle with her finger for Annie to turn round.
‘The bow at the back was a bit tricky.’ Annie tried to peer over her shoulder at it. ‘But it had to go on to hide the gathers. It’s the first time I’ve ever made a dress right from scratch, with new stuff and everything.’ She smoothed down the pin-tucked bodice with obvious pride. ‘I had a terrible job with the button loops, they kept twisting all over the shop, the fiddly things.’
‘It’s simply lovely, Annie.’ Margot guessed that Annie was chattering away not from over-familiarity, but because she’d had no formal training, obviously not knowing any better. Annie had never been taught to be servile, therefore she could be herself. In her present mood, Margot found the situation much to her liking. She smiled. ‘You have a precious gift there in your fingers, Annie. I could almost believe you’ve served your time to dressmaking.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Gray.’ Annie remembered to give a little bob. ‘I must have got it from my mother. She could make a blouse from a duster, and her feather stitching was that fine you’d need a magnifying glass to see it.’
Margot smoothed down her skirt. She hadn’t enjoyed herself’so much in a long time. Her mother had once told her she came from peasant stock, so that could account for the fact that she felt completely at home in the tiny room with the rag rugs on the floor, and the furniture so crowded together there was hardly room to squeeze a body between the table and the overloaded dresser.
For another thing she was warm for the first time in weeks. The fireplace in the drawing-room up at the house was large enough to take an ox for roasting, but the room itself was as cold as a dank tomb. Her feet were perpetually numb, and although she knew she should wear heavier shoes, she wasn’t ready to give in to her age for a long time yet. It was bad enough having two enormous step-daughters clomping about in unspeakable footwear. She looked down at her pale green, high-buttoned shoes, turning an ankle this way and that to admire them. The day was a long way off when she would be inclined to put comfort before fashion.
‘May I?’ She unbuttoned her long duster coat.
Annie looked embarrassed enough to cry. ‘Take it off if you want to, Mrs Gray. I never thought you’d be stopping or I’d have asked you to do so before.’
Margot shook her head. ‘I won’t take it off, thank you, Annie. I really came to say how sad it is to see Adam going about his work without a dog at his heels. We gave him the dog as a puppy when one of our border-collies had an unfortunate meeting with a stray.’ She sighed. ‘Mr Armstrong said he’d hated putting the dog to sleep.’
Moving a piece of paper pattern from a chair, Annie sat down. ‘Mr Armstrong thinks more of animals than he does of human beings.’
Margot sat up straight. ‘You know Seth Armstrong?’
‘I should do. I lived at his house right through the cold snap.’
‘Do you mean you were working there?’
Annie knew her face had gone red. She wished she’d kept her mouth shut, but there was no going back on it now. Not with Mrs Gray’s eyes standing out from her head on stalks. ‘In a way I was, an’ yet in another way I wasn’t. It was all because he knocked me down – at least his horse knocked me down – on the top road on the edge of the moors. He took me back to his house till I got better.’
‘When was that, did you say?’
‘Early on in the year. When we had all that snow.’
‘So you saw him yesterday?’ Margot frowned. In that case why hadn’t Seth admitted that he knew the gardener’s girl? She sensed an intriguing mystery.
Annie’s chin was up. ‘No, I never saw him yesterday. I made sure I was away to town before he got here.’
‘You don’t like Mr Armstrong?’
‘It’s not for me to like or dislike him, Mrs Gray.’
‘You mean for the likes of me, don’t you, Annie? A remark like that doesn’t become you. Tell me why you’ve taken such a dislike to him. I wouldn’t have thought a man like that had an enemy in the world.’
Annie could hardly bear to look at the elegant woman sitting in Adam’s chair. Mrs Gray was playing a game. She was pretending they were two neighbours having a good old gossip by the fire. But they weren’t, were they? This woman with prune-coloured hair puffed up like a barmcake, circles of rouge on her cheeks and button-bright eyes was bored to death sitting around all day doing nothing. She was here to pass the time on, thinking she might learn something to have a good laugh about with her family that evening. Right then. Why not give her something interesting enough to pass on? Then they could all enjoy themselves.
‘To tell you why I don’t like Mr Armstrong, I would have to start at the beginning,’ she said, too loudly.
‘I’m listening, Annie.’
Annie stood up, feeling that what she had to say would come better from a standing position. In that moment she was once again Annie Clancy standing at the poss-tub day after day, wearing a man’s flat cap, her mother’s old blouse and over-large pit boots. She took a deep breath.
‘My father is a collier. When I lived at home he would come in reeking of pit muck and sweat. There’d be cockroaches in his clothes, and I used to shake them out and bang his trousers against the backyard wall to get the worst of the dirt out. He drank most of his wages away, so that there was never enough for food, and what there was my mother gave to me and my five brothers.’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘My father used to take his leather belt off and hit me with it. Just me. Never my brothers.’
Margot put out a hand. ‘Don’t go on if you don’t want to, Annie. I have no wish to pry,’ she said insincerely.
She was ignored. It was as though all the bad things in Annie’s life, all the remembered hurts, the suffering, rose up in her, not in sorrow but in anger. Not all that long ago it would have been in sorrow, but not now. Never again.
‘My mother died when I was twelve. Of malnutrition, the doctor said. Of years and years of reckoning on she had eaten, when all the time she was so hungry she could have gnawed the table leg. So when she took ill there was nothing there to give her strength. No resistance.’ Annie fought for control. ‘My father brought a lodger to the house, a sailor, a travelling man he called himself, an’ one day he saw me crying after a beating, an’ because I was upset I let him lay with me. The next day he went away, after promising to marry me. Soon after that I found I was having a baby.’
‘Go on, Annie.’
‘I wanted to kill myself, but I hadn’t the nerve, so I hid myself with a loose shawl and I went on working, doing other folks’s washing and looking after the boys.’ Her voice fell almost to a whisper. ‘Then one day Father O’Leary knocked
on the door. I saw him standing there in his big black hat, carrying the walking stick that looked more like a shillelagh. So I asked him to pray to God on my behalf, and what did he do but tell Mrs Greenhalgh from the bottom house that I had got myself into trouble. He didn’t know that my father was there in the house listening, and what did he do but come tearing up the street with that woman, telling me they were getting married and that I’d have to go to the workhouse.’ Like a child she knuckled a tear away from her eye. ‘But I wasn’t going to no workhouse, so I walked over the top road to find work, an’ it was then that Mr Armstrong’s horse knocked me down.’
‘And the baby?’
‘I lost it.’ Annie was calming down now that the relief in speaking out was flooding through her. ‘An’ I was glad. I was happy to get rid.’
‘Under circumstances like that I would have felt exactly the same.’
Annie was so surprised she sat down again.
‘I mean it, Annie. Babies should never come where they’re not wanted. How could you have looked after it at your age, without money or a roof over your head?’
‘I was glad,’ Annie repeated. ‘I could have sung aloud I was that glad. I can’t tell you how glad I was.’
Margot shot her a shrewd glance. ‘Now tell me why you hate Mr Armstrong.’
‘Because he …’
She had been going to say she hated him because he had tried to take advantage of her that last night. That he was like all the rest, not to be trusted. Pretending to be kind to her, even treating her like a lady, talking to her, telling her she had the character and the looks to make herself into anything she wanted to be. The anger was still in her, and in that telling moment she was back in the old stone house, in the fire-lit room, held closely in the animal doctor’s arms. She could feel the hardness of his mouth on her own, feel the heat coming from him, see the way his eyes had darkened as he held her so close the breath went out of her.
