‘You do far too much walking,’ he told her when he reached her. ‘You will overtire yourself, especially in this heat. Stay there in the shade and I’ll send Jacobs back with the carriage.’
‘No, please, dearest. I enjoy walking. I’m perfectly all right,’ she assured him.
He was annoyed but said, ‘Very well.’ And spurred his horse away along the dirt path.
Lorianna was glad to be alone again. She needed to think and to savour the relief she felt and the gratitude to Robert Kelso that was flowing with the warm blood through her veins.
14
‘Alice!’ It was a wail of terror. ‘Don’t leave me. Please take me with you!’
Clementina had stumbled through from the night nursery in the dark just in time to catch Alice, candle in hand, crossing the passageway towards the stairs. By the candle’s puny flicker Clementina could make out that she was wearing her jacket, which confirmed the child’s worst fears. Alice wasn’t just going downstairs—she was leaving the house.
‘Bloody hell!’ Alice exploded. ‘I’m stuck with you all day and every day. Is that not enough? Am I not entitled to a few hours peace at night on my own?’
‘I won’t be any trouble Alice, God’s honour. Don’t leave me here alone. The Green Lady and the Black Slave and the Burning Man will all come howling up the stairs. That’s when they’re supposed to—when people are alone.’
Despite her extreme irritation, Alice couldn’t help being affected by such an awful vision. ‘Bloody hell!’ she repeated. ‘But what am I supposed to do with you?’
‘Take me with you, oh please, Alice!’
‘I’m meeting somebody and that’s a secret, mind. I’ll slit you up and feed your innards to the pigs if you tell a soul.’
‘I won’t tell, honest to God, Alice.’
‘I’d have to leave you somewhere outside and collect you on my way back, so you’d be on your own then, outside in the dark.’
‘I’m not frightened of outside. There are no ghosts outside, only in the tower.’
‘Away and get some clothes on then and be quick about it. Bloody hell, I need my head looked at. If you make me late, I’ll feed the whole of you to the cannibal man.’
Stumbling back to the night nursery in the dark with Alice hurrying after her, holding up the candle, Clementina said, ‘You told me he slept sound as a rock at night and that it was only during the day he came out.’
‘I’d feed you to him during the day, then.’
‘Help me with my buttons, Alice.’
‘It’s high time you learned to do your bloody buttons up yourself. Nobody helps me with my buttons—nobody ever helped me with my buttons.’
‘I can do them myself,’ Clementina said indignantly. ‘It’s just that it’s too dark and I can’t see them.’
‘Oh, come here!’ Alice put down the candle and tugged Clementina towards her by her liberty bodice. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve being tormented by you. Never mind your petticoats, just shove your dress on and a jacket or something. What a bloody carry-on. I need my head looked at, so I do!’
At last some clothes were thrown on higgledy-piggledy and shoes buckled over drooping half-secured stockings. Then, clutching each other’s hands, the pair set off.
Not a word passed between them until they had tiptoed safely through the sleeping house. Nor did they dare speak until they had hurried down the winding drive and had reached the shelter of the bushes and trees to the left where the path led to a five-bar gate and a stile.
‘Where are we going?’ Clementina whispered.
‘Over here.’
‘Then where?’ she asked breathlessly as she scrambled across the stile.
‘The high woods near the cornfields, but I’ll leave you in the lane.’
Clementina knew this place well during the day. The path through the little meadows they now hurried along had oak trees that she had clambered up on other occasions and the meadows were rich with flowers too. But further up, nearer the wood, the lane became hollowed out between high banks. The banks at first were clothed with fern and then, when the hill became steeper, with fir trees standing tall and thick together, barely allowing the sunbeams misty with dust to fall aslant between them.
‘You wait here,’ Alice said. ‘Settle yourself down behind that briar bush so I’ll know where to find you if you drop off to sleep.’
Clementina did as she was told and as she crouched into a tight little ball, Alice’s solid bulk merged away into the shadows and eventually disappeared.
During the day there was always something to see in the lane. Squirrels darted about and she had spied stoats as well. She had gathered ferns and flowers while birds sang noisily overhead. Now everything was eerily quiet and all she could see was an occasional bat and a white owl gliding down the slope.
Alice was taking such a long time that Clementina found herself nodding off to sleep, despite the cold evening air and the cutting draughts her lack of petticoats allowed in. Then suddenly she was alerted with relief and joyous expectation at the sound of a crackling twig. She was about to cry out when just in time she noticed that the shadowy figure approaching along the lane was taller and thinner than Alice and indeed not a girl at all but a man. As he came nearer she held her breath in an anguish of suspense in case he detected her presence. He was wearing a battered felt hat with a feather sticking from it, a scarf loosely knotted at his throat and a dark jacket and corduroys. Across his shoulder he carried a long ash stick on which a load of hares was slung, an equal number balanced back and front.
Clementina had never been so relieved in her life as when he passed within yards of where she was crouching and seemed completely unaware of her existence. Long after he had disappeared she was still weakly shaking and when Alice did return at last she clung to her in a sudden rush of tears.
‘A man nearly got me,’ she sobbed. ‘He was carrying a whole lot of hares. Was that the cannibal man taking them home for his breakfast?’
‘Don’t be daft,’ Alice scoffed. ‘That was only Wattie McLeod, the poacher. He’s out most nights killing something or other—he wouldn’t hurt a fly!’
Bewildered and weary beyond any more words, Clementina allowed herself to he dragged away. By the time they reached the house she was sleeping on her feet and had no recollection of going to bed in the nursery, although she faintly remembered the dreamlike effort of staggering up the twisting tower stairs and bouncing painfully off the walls. She awoke in bed next morning with all her clothes on, even her shoes, and her hair in such a tangle that Alice complained it would take them all day to get it presentable for her to go into the sitting-room to visit her mother. Clementina said she didn’t want to go to the sitting-room anyway and didn’t like her mother, so what was the point?
‘She pays my wages, that’s the bloody point,’ said Alice. ‘So we’ve got to be nice and clean and tidy and polite for her every night.’
‘Bloody hell!’ said Clementina.
At last between them they got her cleaned up and after breakfast they gave the nursery what Alice called ‘a bit of a tidy’.
‘It’s all it needs,’ Alice explained. ‘There’s no use scrubbing floors and wearing ourselves out doing daft things like that when there’s only the two of us. We’re better to get out and about and enjoy ourselves, sure we are?’
Clementina wholeheartedly agreed. ‘Will we go to Granny’s today?’
‘No, this is her day for going down to Bathgate to visit Mrs Munn.’
That was a disappointment. Clementina had been looking forward to the bread and cheese, not to mention her drop of ale.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said.
Alice sighed. ‘What do you think I am?’
‘You always eat more than me.’
‘Well, I’m bigger than you, aren’t I? There’s more of me to fill. Honest to God, you’d have me disappear away to a shadow!’
‘Maybe if we went down to the kitchen and told Cook, she’d
give us something?’ Clementina suggested. Although even as she spoke she knew it was like describing cloud-cuckoo land, as Alice would say. The nursery and the rest of the house were kept strictly separate. Clementina was never quite sure why; it was as if they had bloody leprosy, Alice said. Or just didn’t exist.
‘Maybe pigs will fly,’ Alice said mournfully.
‘Couldn’t we try?’ Clementina’s hunger was making her reckless. ‘I’ll do the asking. Cook likes me.’
‘Only if she’s in a good mood, and only if she’s not too busy to be bothered with you. And if Mrs Musgrove’s sniffing around, then what will we do?’
‘I’m hungry,’ Clementina glowered stubbornly.
‘Honest to God, you’ll be the death of me yet. Come on! I need my head looked at, so I do.’
They raced down the stairs, but stopped at the oak door to quietly listen first and then cautiously open it a crack to peer into the hall. Great care had to be taken. They knew Clementina’s father and Gilbert had gone, for they had watched them ride away down the drive from the nursery window. But they had no idea of the whereabouts of her mother and Malcolm. Housemaids were bustling about, but they didn’t matter. They wouldn’t tell—probably would neither notice nor care, so harassed were they in trying to keep up with their load of housework. At 6.30 in the morning they had to start cleaning out the fires and then the whole of the drawing-room, sitting-room, dining-room and library, including the carpets which were sprinkled with tea-leaves to keep down the dust before they were brushed. After breakfast they turned out all the bedrooms, which was what they were sweating and puffing over now.
‘All right,’ Alice whispered and they made a dash for it across the hall and along the library corridor to the doors that opened on to the kitchen stairs.
Effie Summers, the under-housemaid—an undersized skinny thirteen-year-old, all big cap, big boots and knobbly elbows—was struggling up the stairs lugging a scuttle of coal. She just gave them a pained half-grimace, half-smile in passing.
Clementina stopped outside the kitchen door and Alice punched her on the shoulder and hissed, ‘It was your idea, not mine.’
Mustering all her courage, Clementina opened the door and went in, Alice following closely at her heels.
Cook was pummelling pastry at the kitchen table as if it was Mrs Musgrove and at the same time shouting at Mima, the kitchen-maid, who was running around in circles like a creature demented.
‘You’re always the same, Mima Fairley. You never know where anything is. If you don’t smarten yourself up you’ll have to find that box of yours, that’s what you’ll have to find, and then pack it and get out of my sight for good. And now what?’ she bawled, catching sight of Clementina and Alice. ‘Can I not get a minute’s peace in my own kitchen? This isn’t Hopeton Street in the middle of Bathgate, you know. People aren’t supposed to come in here. This is private, this is, in case you didn’t know. Do I come up trespassing in your nursery? No, never! So why should you two dare to put a foot in here?’
It was obvious, as Alice said later, that Cook was at the end of her tether and that Mrs Musgrove, without a doubt, had been at the kitchen before them. They retreated in silence, knowing that today their case was hopeless and left by the yard door to scuff their feet down the drive heavy-hearted with disappointment. But Alice was never down for long, any more than her imagination ever failed her.
‘How about berries?’ she announced suddenly.
Clementina’s eyes widened: you had to admire Alice. ‘I never thought of that.’
‘You need your head looked at, that’s why. Come on!’ Alice hitched up her skirts and ran, rocking from side to side on her fat legs, heavy as a miniature carthorse, followed by Clementina frisking and skipping like a young foal at her heels.
15
Wild flowers never lasted long and it seemed a pity to allow the corner in the cottage to become dark again with sad and dead blooms. So, daringly, Lorianna returned. The stone jar was exactly where she had left it but as she had thought, the flowers were beginning to wither. With a light heart she set about removing them, washing the jar and then creating a fresh arrangement. How beautiful it looked, even more beautiful than the last time.
Afterwards she once more suffered misgivings. It was perhaps excusable and understandable to do such a thing once, but to repeat the occurrence was somehow a different matter. Again, however, Robert Kelso made no reference to what she had done. He passed her on the stair of Blackwood House after one of his meetings with Gavin with no more than a fleeting smile and a deep rumbling ‘Good morning.’
Bold now, she began to visit the cottage regularly to attend to the flowers. It was the highlight of her week, the one thing she genuinely looked forward to, that gave her a sweet and simple pleasure with which no grand dinner party or ‘At Home’ could begin to compete. Sometimes she sat down on the settle at the fireside gazing at the flowers. Sometimes, just enjoying the farmhouse kitchen with the sounds of the animals drifting in from outside, she would close her eyes in the solitude and find a deliciously soothing peace. She was sitting like that one day when suddenly she sensed she was no longer alone in the room. Jerking open her eyes, she nearly fainted with shock to see Robert Kelso watching her from the doorway. One of his powerful looking arms was stretched up against the lintel, his big hand resting on it as he lounged there calmly surveying her. The sleeves of his striped shirt were rolled up, showing black hair on his arms, black hair was also revealed by the wide-open front of his shirt. Leggings covered his trousers from just below his knees down to the heavy boots he wore.
Lorianna rose, heart thudding painfully, aware only that she was in what could be construed as a compromising situation with a rough and common workman. Never before had she felt so appalled at herself.
‘Thank you for taking so much trouble with the flowers,’ he said.
She swished the train of her dress round. ‘It was the merest token of appreciation for rescuing me that time from the bull.’
One gloved hand rested elegantly on the handle of her furled parasol, while the other held her skirt against her hip.
‘Actually you have a right to feel angry, Kelso. I have been invading the privacy of your home.’
‘Yes, I would have felt that way with anyone else,’ he said quietly, ‘but not with you.’
Her heart began thudding again. ‘I must go now.’
He dropped his hand from the lintel and moved aside, but he was still near enough the doorway as she passed for her to feel the heat from his body and to sense the rich earthy maleness that emanated from him.
‘Good afternoon,’ she said, without daring to look round.
He made no answer, but she could feel his eyes on her all the time until she reached the shelter of the trees. It was only then, away from any danger, that she realised the full extent of her shock. Her legs were suddenly so weak that they could hardly support her and she had to lean heavily against a tree for a few minutes until she could summon up the strength to move. At last she managed to get back to Blackwood House and, pushing through her secret gate, had the strange feeling of stepping from one world into another which was completely different.
In this different world Lorianna willed herself to be particularly pleasing to Gavin. She was quiet and reserved in company, her eyes kept modestly lowered whenever possible. Her loyalty to him was conscientiously guarded and not one word would she allow Gilbert to say against him. To her friends she praised him unstintingly.
But at the same time she found it impossible to wrench herself free of her secret world.
Comparatively few wild flowers flourished now except on the river bank. Roadsides had become dry and brown and large dead stems of hogweed stood wanly about. Nearly all the flowering grasses had turned to seed. Around the farm swallows gathered in large numbers as they prepared to leave for far-off places. Willow-warblers and chiff-chaffs sang as they drifted away towards the Southern coast.
Now was a time of change, of part
ings. The knowledge stirred in Lorianna unexpected ripples of apprehension. She knew that a choice would have to be faced and a decision taken, but even within the privacy of her inmost thoughts she dared not formulate her vague intuitions in concrete terms. She simply knew that something would have to be done.
Then one day she returned to the farmhouse a second time, as if in her growing anxiety she might find it had gone. Drawn by an irresistible force, she lifted the latch and went in.
He was sitting at the small table, and with barely a glance in her direction he went on eating a succulent-looking steak and a heap of boiled potatoes in their skins. The peppery smell of the steak pervaded the low-ceilinged room and she could see the big iron frying pan in which he had cooked it discarded at one side of the hob. The fire crackled cheerfully against the silence as she went over to stand facing it, with her back to him. She knew by the occasional scraping sound of his knife that he was still calmly cutting up his food, still continuing to eat. Eventually his deep voice broke the silence. ‘You realise what you’re doing?’
She turned then. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I was out walking and I simply thought …’
‘You’re a married woman,’ he interrupted, tossing down his fork and knife then tipping himself back slightly in his chair. ‘You can’t possibly be that naive.’
She ought to have left then but instead she stood helplessly pinned under his stare, helpless as a butterfly in her white dress with its beautiful embroidery and her satin hat afroth with russet and green bows.
There was a need in her to know more about him. ‘You told me you were married once,’ she heard herself say. ‘Were you happy?’
‘Yes.’
‘You must miss her.’
‘I do. But I’m never short of a woman, if that’s what you mean.’
His remark was like a slap in the face and she gasped at the insult behind his words. Praying that she would not shame herself even further by bursting into tears, she ran blindly towards the door, no longer caring about anything except the need to escape from the room.
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