Light & Dark

by Margaret Thomson-Davis

  Her screaming became panic-stricken as she struggled unsuccessfully to get to her feet and run again. Then suddenly she heard a gruff command and a loud barking mixed with her screams as Ben and Jess came racing between her and the bull and stopped it in its tracks. While they were jumping up, barking and snapping at the bull, she felt herself being swept off her feet and carried away.

  ‘You’re all right now,’ the calm deep voice of Robert Kelso assured her. He climbed over the stile and into the next field with her in his arms as coolly and effortlessly as if she had been no heavier than a feather.

  He was wearing an open-necked shirt with the sleeves rolled up and she could feel the warmth and strength of him emanating through his skin, and smell the musky male smell of him. Still holding her, he turned and whistled to the dogs to come.

  ‘Thank you, Kelso,’ she said, her voice trembling with the shock she had had. ‘You can put me down now.’

  But when he did so she cried out in pain. ‘My ankle! I think I must have broken it.’

  Firmly he sat her down on the grass and, kneeling in front of her, he lifted her skirt and put his hands round her ankle. Her heart pounded at the impropriety of the situation, but she refrained from saying anything because after all it was an emergency and he was only trying to help her. Watching him, her face contorted in pain, although his big hands were so gentle that he looked as if he was caressing her.

  ‘No its not broken,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s probably a bad strain. You’ll need to rest it.’

  ‘How am I going to get home?’

  He shrugged. ‘We’re nearer the farm. I can carry you there, put you on a cart and drive you home. Or I can carry you all the way back if you prefer.’

  The embarrassment of arriving at Blackwood House in the arms of the grieve for all to see didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘No, just get me to the farm please,’ Lorianna asked.

  Without another word he slid one hand under her legs and the other round her waist and hoisted her up. She was forced to cling round his neck as he strode along the hard ridged path through the field. Somehow the silence between them intensified the touch of his hand on her legs and waist and the feel of her left breast against the hardness of his chest. Her face was close to his shoulder and she became aware of the rich tan of his skin and the way the development of his shoulder muscles gave a shortened effect at the sides of the neck. She noticed the thick glossy texture of his inky black hair and how it grew thickly down in front of his ears and a smooth black lock of it had slid over his brow. He had very deep-set eyes and when they suddenly stared down at her she noticed they were a cool silvery-grey colour, before she hastily directed her attention to the path ahead. They were nearing the farmhouse and when they reached it Kelso kicked the door open and carried her through a cool shadowy passage and into a low-ceilinged room which was obviously the farm kitchen.

  There was an oak settle by the fire covered with a long cushion, and it was on this that he laid her.

  ‘I ought to get that shoe off now,’ he said. ‘It would be agony for you to get it off later.’

  ‘Very well. But do be careful, Kelso. It’s quite painful enough as it is. Oh!’ She bit her lip and gripped his shoulder as he bent over her, loosened and then removed the shoe. Her foot was now so swollen that she felt quite faint at the sight of it.

  ‘You look pale,’ he said. ‘Try to relax while I make you a cup of tea.’

  He was relaxed enough, she thought, as she watched him move about the room putting the kettle on the fire and fetching a cup and saucer from the dresser.

  ‘Do you live here alone?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. I’ve been a widower now for nearly seven years.’

  ‘Who looks after you?’

  He smiled round at her, surprising her with strong white teeth and the way the smile made his eyes glimmer. ‘I don’t need anyone to look after me.’

  The smile had a most disturbing, melting effect on her. It made her feel more faint and weak than the pain of her ankle and she was thankful that she was reclining back on the settle.

  ‘I mean who cleans the house?’

  He shrugged. ‘The woman who does the bothy scrubs it once a week.’

  ‘I see.’ Lorianna could also see black hairs on his brown arms and chest and the way his shoulders tapered down to a flat abdomen and long muscular thighs. He was a big man, but without an ounce of soft or superfluous fat on his body. She remembered now: ‘the Iron Man’, they called him. She had heard Gavin and Gilbert call him that when they had spoken of his enormous capacity for work and his amazing strength—how he could handle the hundredweight sacks of barley with consummate ease, how he could lift a plough from a farm cart single-handed.

  ‘Drink this,’ he said, now.

  Never before in her life had she been ordered to do anything by a servant. But in the silence that followed, she found herself accepting the cup from his hands and putting it to her lips.

  9

  Clementina had never had such a gloriously happy day in her life. She was dazed with the joy and wonder of it. Henny had taken her to Bathgate to watch the procession and had then decided to let her march with the other children through the decorated streets. They both knew that this was an outrageous and dangerous thing for Henny to do, and if found out would be the means of getting her instantly dismissed.

  Young ladies did not jostle through the streets hatless and gloveless with the hoi palloi.

  The streets were beautiful with their rainbows of bunting looped across from one side to the other and flags sprouting from every window. But loveliest of all were the floral arches made from hundreds of blooms. In the procession there were many floats, most of them supplied by local tradesmen and all vivid splashes of colour, the result of hours of enthusiastic and conscientious labour.

  The reason for the procession was to honour the memory of John Newlands, once a citizen of Bathgate, who had gone out to the West Indies and made a fortune which he left to be used to build a school in which the poor children of the town were to have free education. This had been the origin of the Bathgate Academy, the imposing pillared building perched at the top of the hill in Marjorybanks Street.

  ‘Newlands Day’, however, had become mixed with the ancient history of the town. There were now Royal Proclamations and trumpet-blowing Heralds in colourful regalia and Robert the Bruce rode at the head of the procession on a frisky black stallion. He was followed by an open carriage in which sat his daughter, the lovely Princess Marjory, with a crown on her head and a purple velvet and ermine-trimmed cloak draped round her shoulders. On horseback or in carriages there were also a velvet-cloaked Walter, Lord High Steward of Scotland who had lived in Bathgate Castle and who had married Princess Marjory; the Abbot of Holyrood, Lord Lyon, King-of-Arms, the Earl of Moray and spearmen and others too many to mention all in colourful and dashing costume. There were pipe bands too and lines of enthusiastic drummers. The noise of the procession was earsplitting especially when, each time the children reached one of the floral arches, they cheered at the tops of their voices.

  Clementina yelled with the rest and was so hysterically excited that she kept skipping instead of marching and wildly waving to Henny, who was pushing desperately along through the crowded pavements trying to keep up and not lose sight of her.

  All the children wore their best pinafores and had what they called ‘tinnies’ hanging round their necks on pieces of string; when they eventually reached the field where the sports and games were to take place, their tinnies were filled with milk and they were given a paper bag containing a cheese sandwich, a bun and an apple or an orange.

  Clementina won two races and was given a sixpence and a bar of Highland toffee which she shared with Henny and they chewed for most of the long walk home up the hills. They stopped halfway up the Drumcross Road at the horse-trough, where horses always needed to be watered after the steep climb before being able to continue any further. Henny washed Clementina’s
sticky face and hands and dried them on the skirt of her blue cotton dress. She had been carrying the little girl’s hat and gloves all day and now she put them on the child before anxiously inspecting her. Oh, how beautiful she looked with her long sunny hair shimmering from underneath the white lacy trim of her hat and her emerald eyes jewel bright with joy and love as she gazed up at her. She was glad she had given her the chance to be in the procession. Children, she believed, should have lots of memories of love and happiness to look back on and Clementina, she knew, would never forget this day. But of course it had been an outrageous thing for them to do and something that could yet be discovered with terrible consequences. After all, they still had to get safely into the house and upstairs to the nursery without being seen.

  Certainly Henny knew that the master and mistress were out to dinner, which was why she and Clementina had been able to stay away for so long without needing to rush back for Clementina’s usual evening visit to the drawing-room. But anything could have gone wrong by now—the master and mistress might have returned early; Master Gilbert might be in; or Mrs Musgrove could catch them. Sometimes Henny wasn’t even too sure about some of the maids.

  Still, all the fear and tension and harassment of the day had been worth it, she knew, when she looked at the child’s upturned, happy and adoring face.

  ‘There now,’ she said, dropping a quick kiss on Clementina’s nose. ‘All nice and clean!’

  Hand in hand, they began trudging up the hill again, and along the avenue of trees which dwarfed them. The evening sun dappled their plodding figures as well as the dusty road through the archway of branches. High banks now, hedgerows dark with the shadows of trees and rolling fields with corn bending as if nodding off to sleep. Above, there was the serene blue sky with snowy clouds wisping into bars of gold and pink.

  Along the road in front of Henny and Clementina a white butterfly floated. How quiet and content everything was.

  Henny announced suddenly, ‘Mr Arnold:

  The evening comes, the fields are still,

  The twinkle of the thirsty rill.

  Unheard all day ascends again,

  Deserted is the half-mown plain,

  Silent the swathes! the singing wain,

  The mowers cry, the dogs alarms,

  All housed within the sleeping farms!’

  Clementina sighed with happiness almost too much to bear. To finish such a day with poetry! Only Henny could think of such a thing. And of course it was because of Henny’s love of poetry that she had grown to love it too. Taking her cue from Henny’s inviting pause, she began to recite:

  ‘The business of the day is done,

  The last left haymaker is gone,

  And from the thyme upon the height,

  And from the elder blossom white,

  And pale dog-roses in the hedge,

  And from the mint plant in the sedge.’

  Now Henny joined in and they spoke together:

  ‘In puffs of balm the night air blows,

  The perfume which the day foregoes,

  And on the pure horizon far,

  See, pulsing with the first-born star,

  The liquid sky above the hill!

  The evening comes, the fields are still.’

  Past the Littlegate woods now, where already the interior was dusky and impenetrable. For a minute or two as they walked along they heard a loud though distant clamour of rooks and daws, restlessly moving in their roost-trees before settling for the night. The cawing and dawing rose to a crescendo, then fell into silence.

  By the time they had reached the crossroads both Henny and Clementina’s feet had slowed considerably and Henny had become breathless.

  ‘It’s lovely living in such a hilly place,’ she managed eventually, ‘but oh dear, oh dear, when I say it takes my breath away I mean it literally. I’m puffing like a steam engine again, aren’t I?’

  ‘Shall we stop and rest a while?’ Clementina asked.

  ‘Better not, Miss Clementina. We’re so very late as it is. I dread to think what the master and mistress would say if they knew.’

  ‘I don’t care. I don’t care about them.’

  ‘Oh, Miss Clementina, you must care about your mother and father.’

  ‘They don’t care about me.’

  ‘You mustn’t say such a thing. You mustn’t even think such a thing! Of course they care about you, dear.’

  They turned off the Drumcross Road and along the rough dirt path between some fields and a few scattered trees. Then the trees thickened until on either side there was a thick wall of beech trees with trunks bushy-leafed all the way down. At last there were the big gates of the drive, with meadows opening out at either side. This was where Henny and Clementina felt exposed and apprehensive in case they could be seen from any of the upper windows of the house, although the house was not yet visible to them.

  ‘Run!’ Henny whispered, clutching at her hat and trying not to make too much noise with her boots. Round the curving drive they flew, keeping to the right and the shelter of the rhododendron bushes until they reached the side entrance to the gardeners’ yard and ran into the darkness of the corridor. This was a very tricky and dangerous part, because the corridor was very poorly lit with only an occasional candle. But with great care and quietness they managed to reach the servants’ stair up to the library corridor; from there, with a prayer in their fast-beating hearts, they tiptoed along to the reception hall and across to the door of the tower. Despite her breathlessness Henny still hurried agitatedly up the tower stairs and did not relax until they were both safely shut inside the night nursery.

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear! What a relief, Miss Clementina. Oh, you’ll never know what a relief! Oh dear, oh dear.’ She clutched at her chest, closed her eyes and took a couple of deep breaths.

  Clementina looked at Henny, at her shabby hat askew with flowers drooping over one eye, her short tight jacket, faded blue dress, her black dusty boots; then at her dear face with its sweet turned-up-at-the-corner mouth and delicate dusting of freckles, and an enormous wave of gratitude engulfed her.

  At first she was speechless with it and Henny, suddenly aware of the child’s intense concentration on her, said, ‘What’s wrong, Miss Clementina?’ Her thin hands fluttered up over her shabby clothes and then tried to tidy back stray wisps of hair and tuck them behind her ears.

  ‘Do I look an awful sight?’

  Clementina suddenly fell on her and clutched her fierce round her waist. ‘Thank you.’ The words were muffled against the nurse’s body, but she heard them and was touched.

  ‘Come now,’ she said. ‘We’re both tired—happily tired, thanks be to God—and it’s time we went to bed.’

  Henny helped Clementina to undress first and then tucked her in one of the two iron bedsteads. There Clementina watched Henny enact her magic trick of undressing under her flannelette nightgown.

  ‘Do you mind, Miss Clementina,’ she said, sitting down at last on Clementina’s bed as she brushed out her thick wavy hair, ‘if we just have a little poem tonight instead of a story? I’m so tired, you see.’

  ‘A poem will be perfectly all right,’ Clementina said kindly.

  ‘All right, dear, close your eyes now and I’ll say it very softly. That’s a good girl… .

  ‘A cloudless sky; a world of heather,

  Purple of foxglove; yellow of broom;

  We two among it, wading together,

  Shaking out honey, treading perfume.

  Crowds of bees are giddy with clover,

  Crowds of grasshoppers skip at our feet,

  Crowds of larks at their matins hang over,

  Thanking the Lord for a life so sweet.’

  Clementina drifted off to sleep with a peaceful smile on her face, happy in the knowledge that Henny would sleep close beside her on the other iron bedstead with the patchwork quilt that she had made with her own hands. That night she dreamed of walking hand in hand with Henny round the garden and down to the river ba
nk where the grass was dew-laden and the water sparkling. Bees were humming and brilliant butterflies shimmered in the heat of the early morning sun. The mist had risen from the Bathgate hills and they stood out sharp and clear and higher than before. The bluish mistiness about the woods had also been blown away and everything was bright and beautiful. Everything was clearly defined, even the smells: the sweet smell of the grass and flowers, the pungent aroma of greenery. She awoke with the smell of the flowers strong in her nostrils, only to discover that it was Henny’s familiar toilet water.

  Whenever Henny felt hot or faint, she always refreshed herself with a dab or two of this magic water and then she would take a couple of sniffs of it and say happily, ‘There now, I’m fine again.’

  Clementina had never smelled it so strongly before and when she peered round she immediately saw why. The bottle had fallen from the bedside table and spilled on to the floor.

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ she cried out, unconsciously mimicking Henny as she scrambled up in bed. ‘Henny, your magic water’s all spilled out! You must have knocked it over in your sleep.’

  Henny did not answer and that was unusual. Indeed, it was unusual for Henny to be in bed at all in the morning. She was always up, bustling about and singing when Clementina wakened—ready to report on what a beautiful, interesting day it was, full of wondrous things to learn about and explore.

  ‘Henny, I’m wakened!’

  Clementina bounced from the bed and pattered across to clamber in beside the nurse. But even then Henny didn’t move; she just lay cold and still.

  ‘Henny?’

  Clementina leaned over her to peer into the fragile bird face, almost invisible in its nest of tousled brown hair. And as she continued to stare, the terrible truth began to dawn on her.

  ‘Oh, Henny, please don’t be dead!’

  She was too shocked to weep. Clinging to the flannelette nightgown, she pressed her face hard against it and kept on repeating, ‘Don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead.’