by Marie Joseph
Christmas came and went, as the seasons came and went, uneventfully, with a January so wet it was more like spring.
One night Annie sat at the table writing a letter and, fearsome less it was to the animal doctor, Adam asked her straight out who she was writing to.
‘A lady who lived two doors down from us.’ Annie put her pencil down. ‘She looked after her mother as well as working in the mill. Her mother was bedfast, and I’ve had a feeling for a long time now that the old lady has died.’ She began to write again. ‘So the best way to find out is to ask.’
After she had gone up to bed Adam took the letter down from the dresser-shelf and examined the address. A slow reader himself, able to write only in capitals, he couldn’t get over the neatness of Annie’s joined-up script with small, perfectly-formed letters. He traced the name and address with his finger: Edith Morris. Miss Edith Morris. He put the letter back, took up his candlestick and climbed the stairs to his bed.
He didn’t like the idea of Annie getting in touch with her past life. He drew the stone hot-water bottle up from the foot of the bed and cradled it to him. Still, writing to an old spinster about her mother was surely harmless enough.
When he woke up after an uneasy twitching sleep, the sky was beginning to redden, and the frost had at last arrived.
Edith showed Annie’s letter to Mick the minute he arrived for his reading lesson.
‘For practice you can read it aloud to me,’ she said, handing him the single sheet of paper.
Mick took it from her with a sinking heart. He had begun to think that Miss Morris had stopped bothering about finding young Annie Clancy since that wasted visit to the Eccles’s farm. Since then life had been so good to him, he could hardly believe his luck. For one thing he’d got himself a regular job bagging coal up to put on the carts. Forty on each cart, packed that tight you’d a job to separate them. He could have a bag on the weighing machine and up on the cart quicker than any man in the yard. It was the strength in him, he’d told Miss Morris, holding out an arm for her to feel his muscle.
He wasn’t feeling strong now as he began to read, stumbling over each word, running a finger along the lines.
Dear Miss Morris,
I know you will be surprised to hear from me after such a long time, but I have stopped writing to my father. He said he would throw any letters I might write on to the back of the fire, and that is what he must be doing. But I would like to know how they are, especially the boys. Also I hope your mother is well. I hope you don’t mind me writing to you. I am housekeeping in the mornings and working in a big house doing their sewing in the afternoons. I am well and happy.
Hoping you are the same.
Annie Clancy
He handed the letter back, knowing he’d made a bad job of reading it, accepting as he stumbled over every single word that this life, this new shining life, would come to an end now that Miss Morris knew where to find Annie Clancy.
She looked as pleased as punch with herself. He’d noticed that the moment she had let him in. And there was a tantalising smell coming from the fire-oven. Oxtail, he guessed, slow cooked till the meat dropped off the jellied bones, with a sago pudding maybe afterwards, thick and creamy with a nutmeg crisp skin on top. All that would end now. It would be Annie Clancy getting her feet underneath the table, not him. He stared into the fire, sunk deep into a terrible despair.
Edith had gone quiet, too. She could read this big rough-spoken man like a book. She knew the effort it took him to present himself clean and tidy for his lessons since he worked as a coal bagger down at the yard. And she knew exactly how her finding Annie’s address would have affected him.
‘When are you fetching her back?’ he said now. Then he made the supreme sacrifice. ‘I’ll come with you if you want.’ He stared at Edith, a dull hopeless stare revealing all the terrible dread that had been growing in his heart day by day.
‘I haven’t thought yet,’ Edith said. She couldn’t bear to see the expression in Mick’s eyes. It was as if his soul was revealed there for her to see. He was curling his big hands into fists, actually blinking to force back tears. He was suddenly disintegrating right there before her.
‘I’d best not come any more,’ he said in his low rumble of a voice. ‘Best make it a clean break before Annie moves in.’ He got up to go, snatching his jacket off the hook behind the door.
‘Mick!’ Edith felt rooted to her chair. His reaction to the letter hadn’t surprised her, but she had never expected it to be so dramatic, so violent, so final.
‘Mick!’ She stepped outside on to the pavement, calling after him, but it was too late.
Within five minutes of leaving the cosy room, the fire built so that it roared up the chimney-back, Mick was down at the pub, pushing his way rudely through the men crowding round the bar. Shouting for a bloody drink at the top of his voice.
13
SO GRANDMA MORRIS was dead. Annie folded Edith’s letter and stored it away in the spare teapot on the dresser.
‘Well? What does it say?’
Adam knew it wasn’t any of his business, but he had to know. Ever since Annie had written to this Miss Morris he had lived in dread of her turning up at the cottage door, or worse still of Annie’s father coming to claim her once he found out there was no illegitimate baby to bring them shame.
Annie didn’t seem put out by his curiosity. ‘She says the boys are all right, and that Billy is going down the pit when he leaves school at Easter. She says my father takes his wife out every Friday night, that they walk down the street to the Ram’s Head arm in arm – would you believe it?’
‘So that’s all right then.’ Adam was so relieved he could have shouted aloud. Instead, he went out of the back door, hiding his feelings by whistling under his breath. Annie wasn’t going to leave him to go back to her old home. Things were going on all right there; this Miss Morris had said so.
‘Are you going to write back?’ he asked that evening, as they sat over the fire, Annie busy with sewing she’d brought with her from the big house.
‘I don’t think so.’ Annie put down the length of crimson silk she was fringing and hemming by hand. ‘She says I’ll always be welcome, but from the tone of the letter it’s obvious Miss Morris doesn’t want to know any more than I’ve told her. I put myself beyond the pale when I got into trouble. It’s just the sort of letter I imagined she would write – no feeling to it at all.’
Adam wished she wouldn’t mention the trouble. It bothered him even to remember it. When Clara had first told him he hadn’t liked it then. Annie was so lovely, so untouched, like a spring morning when the first cowslip appears dew-wet in the meadow grass.
‘Aye, best let well alone,’ he said.
Edith Morris thought she must be going mad. She was as lonely as ever now that Mick no longer came, and too proud to admit the reason for her despair. What was he, after all, but a rough-spoken Irish labourer who had warmed himself by her fire, eaten her food, pretended he wanted to learn how to read and write?
Why had she written in that cold way to young Annie? Why? When for so long she had dreamed of the day she would find her and bring her here to live. Now the thought of the red-haired girl sitting opposite to her in the chair where Mick had sat filled her with pain. Besides, Annie’s letter hadn’t been written by a lost and bewildered girl at the end of her tether. The baby was no more and Annie was well and happy. She had said so. She didn’t need to be rescued. She was young and strong with all her life ahead of her.
Edith got up from her chair and walked slowly upstairs to her tiny bedroom at the front of the house. It was cold and damp. It had never known the warmth of a fire since the day the house was built, and in the tiny grate with its iron canopy Edith had pleated a fan of newspaper which she changed regularly once a month when she gave the room a thorough bottoming.
She paid no attention to the cold. It had seeped into her bones years ago and she accepted it as normal. Setting the candle down on her bedside
table, she knelt by the wooden cross which stood on a lace-edged runner on top of a chest-of-drawers.
‘Dear God, help me to cease this fevering of my blood. Thou knowest no man has ever touched me, so why should I be acting like a young and foolish girl? A foolish virgin, I should have said …’ She felt the tears trickle through her fingers. ‘Bring me to my senses, Lord, and show me the true way to Thy salvation. Amen.’
It was a terrible prayer to have said, a dreadful admission of weakness. But prayers were answered if the Lord saw fit to answer them. For the next few weeks she went as usual to the mill in the pitch-dark every morning, stood at her looms and concentrated on her work. She was a model weaver, sticking to the rules and abiding by them. She wore her hair high and close to her head to avoid the danger of it being drawn into the ever moving belts; she paid no fines for faulty cloth, and she never needed to have her pay docked for arriving late in the mornings. She was, as usual, beyond reproach in every way.
But spring was on its way, even though the watery sun did no more than touch briefly the top half of the backyard wall. Edith walked home in the light, let herself in to her empty ordered house, and wept.
The wanting, the longing, the aching for the sight of a grizzled head and the sound of a deep rough voice in mid-curse was a pain deep down in her abdomen. ‘Belly’, Mick would undoubtedly have said. Every time a knock came to the door she expected to open it and see him standing there, holding his cap in his hand, shuffling his big feet, blurting out how bloody stupid he’d been for stopping away so long.
But he never came and during a sleepless night, when the March wind rattled the sash-window till she was sure it would collapse into the street below, Edith shouted aloud at the God who seemed to have turned His back on her.
Annie left the letter where it was, in the brown teapot, but she thought about it often as she sat with her sewing at the big house. What she had expected she didn’t know, but every word was as cold and unfeeling as Edith Morris herself.
‘She would run a mile if a man looked twice at her,’ she told Adam, liking to make him smile.
‘From how you’ve described her I don’t think there’s much danger of a man looking at her once,’ Adam said, quick as a lick.
Annie could see he was getting over the shock of his wife’s death nicely. She expected he was forgetting as well as regretting the proposal of marriage he’d made to her when still in deep grief. The arrangement of working afternoons up here in the comfortable sewing-room at the top of the big house was going well, now she had made Adam understand she wouldn’t be bullied.
Annie folded her sewing and put it away for the next day. Dorothea was going to look splendid in the black velvet evening gown with the satin inlets in the puffed sleeves, in spite of the fact that she’d fidgeted and grumbled through every fitting. She was down there in the stable yard giving her horse its daily strapping, talking to a man who straightened up from his examination of the horse’s foot, looked up at the window and gave Annie a curt nod of his head.
She turned away at once, but not before she was sure she’d seen a flash of mockery in the strangely light eyes.
Seth caught up with her as she walked back to the cottage down the long, winding drive.
‘Everything all right, Annie?’
‘Perfectly all right, thank you.’
‘You’re looking very tired.’
‘That’s because I’m busy.’ She tried to walk on, but it was no use. He seemed determined to annoy her.
‘You don’t look all that happy to me.’
Annie was so angry she could have hit him. He had folded his arms, planted his feet wide apart, and was staring intently at her with his eyes narrowed.
‘Having any more trouble with that ear?’
Annie’s face flamed. ‘I hear what I want to hear.’
‘Your eyes are red. Maybe you should be wearing glasses for such close work.’
Was he serious? Did he really think he had the right to talk to her like this?
‘I’m perfectly healthy,’ she told him. ‘I don’t need glasses nor an ear trumpet. I suggest you keep your concern for those who appreciate and would benefit from it. Like Mr Gray’s horses, or his pigs. And now, if you’ll stand aside …’
She walked on, more than a little pleased with the way she’d dealt with that, but instead of going into the cottage she turned off the winding drive into a narrow field path, lifting her skirts clear of the mud-filled ruts where the shire horses had been exercised. She kicked a stone out of her way. She was tired and on edge, and her eyes ached from the strain of working on the black velvet.
Opening the gate and closing it carefully behind her, she walked along a barely visible path until she came to a small hump-backed bridge over what had once been a gravel pit. The long valley spread out before her, all in differing shades of green. The countryside, the real countryside with distant woods, so dense they were almost black, a meandering river lit to silver by the unusually strong light, all bisected by twisting ribbons of dry stone walls. The mines with their steep little streets of dark huddled houses and slag heaps seemed a million miles away.
Annie thought of her father, of Georgie and the four younger boys. All destined to work underground like moles, hardly seeing the light of day, never realising that all this beauty even existed.
How could Seth Armstrong suggest that she wasn’t happy, when he had no idea of how it had been for her before he found her wandering the fells that dark winter’s night?
She turned, and taking what she imagined was a short cut walked straight into a bramble thicket, with thorns that dragged at her dress. It would have been easier and far more sensible to turn back and retrace her steps over the bridge, but Annie’s mood was for fighting on, for finding her own way, for getting her bearings once she was free of the brambles. She was sure that if she skirted that wood, crossed that thread of a steam, picking her way over the two flat stepping-stones, she would be back at the cottage within minutes.
But when she climbed the long slope of a hill she looked down on a wide expanse of heathered wastes broken by isolated heaps of stone ruins. She looked up at the sky. She had no idea of how far she had walked, whether she had gone in circles or in a direct route away from the cottage. Town bred, she had none of the countryman’s inborn instinct for survival, but surely it made sense to turn her back on that wild stretch of moorland and retrace her steps as far as possible?
She remembered a true story told to her by her mother years ago. A pitman, walking the hills one Sunday in summer, lost his way in a mist, fell down a gully and lay there for seven days and eight nights before being found by a search party. Still alive, but completely insane, his finger nails worn away in his frantic struggles to climb out.
Annie could see no sign of any creeping mist, but she was sure she could feel it in her bones. In March anything could happen – rain, snow, high winds, and days like today of pleasant warmth. There were signs of rabbits all around; purple violets flowered beneath a straggling hedge, but at any minute now she could be enveloped in a dank white curling mist, as lost as if she wandered alone on the far plains of the moon. Her next sliding, slipping steps brought her to a sudden totally unexpected clearing edged by the thick scrub and bramble bushes she remembered earlier. Sure now that the way back lay straight ahead of her she picked up her skirts and fought her way as carefully as her rising panic would allow her through the tangled undergrowth.
When she heard the soft murmur of voices she stopped, a hand to her heart. For the past hour the only sound she had heard had been the bleat of a lone wandering sheep. It had seemed as if she would never hear a human voice again. She listened, not moving, standing quite still. Yes, there it was again, a muffled voice, followed by a scream of what sounded like a lighthearted protest. Moving cautiously, Annie edged forward.
The voices came, it seemed, from down the hill, carrying up to her, borne on the wind. Moving out into a sudden clearing, she looked down on a sight that
brought a swift rush of colour to her face and started a trembling in her legs.
Lying on a dark brown blanket of bracken was Johnson, the parlour maid, with the handyman, Kit Dailey, straddled across her. His bare legs and buttocks shockingly white against the bracken. Deep in the throes of his passion his movements were rhythmic, fast and thrusting. Johnson was moaning, turning her head from side to side, her long, blue-black hair loosed from its neat bun.
Annie froze, stifled a cry by pressing fingers across her mouth, sank down on her knees on the hard stubbled grass. It was Laurie Yates all over again, groaning as he laboured in uncontrollable passion in the back room of her father’s house. It was the realisation of what her father would have seen if he had come in through the door. It was the pain again, her sore back pressed down hard into the straw mattress; it was the feeling that she was being torn in two.
She got up, moved too quickly and dislodged a stone, a large stone which clattered and bounced its way down the slope.
‘What the …?’
Johnson’s face was a mask of stunned disbelief. As the handyman scrabbled for his trousers, his voice was a bellowing shout of rage.
‘Annie Clancy! Of all the dirty little tykes! Of all the scum! Watching us, for God’s sake! Up there snooping. Watching. Holy mother of God, I’ll kill you for this!’
‘I wasn’t …’ Annie knew this was no time for explanations; knew she wouldn’t be believed anyway. Kit was hopping on one foot as he buttoned himself up, ready to come after her, while Johnson, hair flying, was already crossing the stream on her way up the hill.
But Annie was away, running as fast as she could across the uneven ground, mouth open, stumbling and falling, getting up and running on again. The inference that she had been watching horrified and sickened her. Those two had had it in for her since that first day. She had seen the look of undiluted hatred on the parlour maid’s face. And Kit Dailey was just as bad. They made no secret of their dislike for her.
