by Valerie Wood
18
Mrs Masterson had graciously given a recommendation on Alice’s character, even though she hardly knew the girl, and was therefore instrumental in obtaining for her a position as a seamstress in a high-class dressmaking establishment in the fashionable coastal resort of Scarborough.
She was thirteen years old when she took a tearful farewell of her family. Scarborough was too far away for frequent visits, the hours were long, the work was demanding, and for the first few weeks Alice went home to her shabby lodgings, ate her supper and went to bed, crying herself to sleep.
As time passed, though, she emerged from her cloud of misery and looked around her with fresh eyes. She became less unhappy, and began to enjoy her new surroundings and the merry company of the other girls at work. She was persuaded, with some trepidation at first, to visit the theatre, and taken to watch the horse racing on the sands and the Morris dancers who entertained the ladies and gentlemen who came to the spa town for the mineral waters and the sea bathing.
The air was considered to be highly beneficial in Scarborough, and with the restraints of home and the dependency on parents gone, a sparkle came to her grey eyes, her cough diminished, and a few heads were turned at the young, dark-haired girl with a spring in her step and the promise of beauty just unfolding.
It was natural, therefore, that when Sarah reached the same age, Maria should ask her mistress to do the same favour for her second daughter. This time, however, Maria was in something of a quandary as to what type of work Sarah would be suited for.
Will was of the opinion that she could do better than just going into service, for wasn’t she able to read and write as well as Miss Lucy? It was a pity she wasn’t a lad, he said, for she could get a job in Isaac Masterson’s office as a clerk. But as Maria tartly reminded him, had she been a lad then she wouldn’t be able to read and write as well as she did.
They were impressed when she brought home Mr Masterson’s discarded newspapers and read to them, giving them news of the war which, after an uneasy peace, had broken out once again between Britain and France. Items of national importance, as well as shipping and industrial reports, all were read with understanding and without hesitation or stumbling. She also read them news of the rapidly expanding whaling fleet in Hull, which was now a major port, and of the ships which were pushing ever further north to track down the whales.
But the very fact that Sarah was so clever bothered Maria more than a little, for who would want a housemaid who could read and write probably better than her mistress?
‘I wondered, ma-am, if she would be suitable for someone with a large family, to assist with the childre’, until she’s a bit older, then perhaps she could be a companion or a lady’s maid?’
‘Hmm, I will give it some thought, Maria,’ Isobel said, which Maria knew meant that she would ask Mr Masterson when he came home.
‘It perhaps wasn’t a good idea for her to take lessons, after all, Isaac. I would not like to think that we have spoiled her chance of employment.’
Isobel was consulting her husband as they sat over supper the next evening, and neither of them was prepared for the emotional outburst from Lucy when she heard that Sarah might be taken away from her.
‘But, Lucy, she has a living to earn. Had she been living anywhere else but here she would already be in service,’ Isobel explained irritably. ‘She has been very, very fortunate.’
Isaac sat quietly and finished his wine, saying nothing, waiting for the heated debate to subside.
‘She can’t go,’ cried Lucy passionately. ‘Who would I talk to, walk with? Papa, she’s my friend, she’s been with me all of my life, you can’t let her go.’ She burst into tears and rushed from the room.
‘It seems to me that Mrs Love has been rather lax in teaching Lucy decorum,’ said Isobel coldly. ‘I must speak to her. There are other kinds of instruction to be considered as well as education.’
Isaac pondered no more than a day. If Lucy was going to be unhappy without her childhood companion, then there was only one solution. He asked Maria to send Sarah to him that he might talk to her.
She stood smiling before him, a tall girl for her years with the rounded plumpness of budding womanhood. Her long red hair was thick and curly, and she had tied it with a brown ribbon in the nape of her neck, though several corkscrew tendrils had escaped and danced around her cheeks.
Sarah was not intimidated in Mr Masterson’s presence, unlike Lizzie who still scuttled out of sight whenever he appeared, or Janey who giggled behind his back at his heavily jowled chin and his crooked, old-fashioned wig. Sarah considered him to be an eminent friend, one who was kind and generous, for he had often brought her presents too when bringing them for Lucy, one to be treated with respect.
‘You wanted to see me, sir?’ She dropped him a slight graceful curtsey.
Her voice was soft and her brown eyes met his in an open gaze.
‘Your mother tells us that it is time you went away to seek employment, in service or such capacity.’ He sat back in his leather armchair and linked his hands, looking at his fingertips. ‘Is this what you want?’
The smile disappeared from her face and a shadow crossed it, a fleeting look of unhappiness which she was unable to hide.
‘It’s what I must do, sir,’ she replied. ‘I can’t always be dependent on my parents.’ She hesitated. ‘Or on you and Mrs Masterson, you have already given me many advantages, and I’m very grateful.’
He liked her self-possessed manner, her gentle way of speaking, but above all her repose, which was very soothing. Lucy would do well to emulate some of her qualities.
‘So, if you didn’t go away, what would you like to do?’
‘I haven’t really thought about it, sir,’ she answered reflectively. ‘I have always known that one day I would have to go away.’ Her eyes became luminous for a moment and she bit her lip, saying with a tremulous smile, ‘I suppose that what I really want is to stay here for always, and for nothing to change.’
‘What, no fancy to work in other places, or find yourself a husband?’
She smiled shyly. ‘I would like to see other places perhaps, but I would still like to come back here. I feel as if I might be needed.’
‘Be needed?’ he queried. ‘In what way?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’ She blushed. ‘It’s just a feeling that I have.’
He didn’t really understand her but he smiled kindly and nodded his head. ‘Well, what if I said that we needed you. That Miss Lucy needs you and wants you to stay. What would you say to that, eh?’
There wasn’t very much that she could say, so she waited patiently for him to continue, her hands clasped in front of her.
‘Suppose I offered you a position, such as you might obtain elsewhere, with a similar salary and conditions, but here in this house as companion to Miss Lucy. A position where you would be independent of your parents, but able to see them, not only on your days off, but at other times during the course of your duties. Now how does that sound?’
‘It sounds wonderful, sir. Thank you, oh, thank you! May I go and tell Lucy – Miss Lucy, I mean, sir?’
‘Er, no, I will tell her myself, and Mrs Masterson. But go and tell your mother and your father, by all means. They will be delighted, I’m sure, that they are to keep you for a little longer.’
He hadn’t of course mentioned what salary she would receive, but he would give her the going rate, or perhaps a little more. He felt sure that whatever he gave her would be more than repaid if it meant that Lucy would be happy.
‘I’m not sure that it is a good idea, Isaac,’ Isobel complained. ‘They already spend far too much time together. I very much fear that we shall take Sarah out of her own class. Still, as long as she realizes her position, and you too, Lucy. Never forget that you are the daughter of the house, and that Sarah is a paid companion.’
Lucy tossed her head sulkily. ‘Sarah never forgets, she never has.’
Indeed, Sarah had always
known instinctively, or been taught at her mother’s knee, she didn’t know which, that there was an invisible barrier between herself and Lucy, that, although they had played together and slept in the same crib like sisters, there were times when she had to draw back, to become less than she was in order that Lucy could become more.
The realization had come to her when she was still a small child, when she and Lucy had been taken in the carriage to visit the Smallwood children. They had played and taken tea in the nursery, but when the time had come to depart, Lucy had been taken to the drawing-room to say her goodbyes to her hosts, whilst Sarah was bidden to wait in the hall.
Now she knew what to do. Whilst Lucy took tea in the drawing-room with her elders, Sarah was escorted to the kitchen, there to be observed with some curiosity by the Smallwood servants. In response to their curious questioning she adopted the local dialect, for she knew already the ridicule her normal accent could bring, having suffered from the jeers of the Monkston village children.
‘Mrs Love, isn’t it splendid?’ said Lucy. ‘Sarah is to stay with us. She’s not going away after all.’
Lucy was so delighted that she flung her arms around Sarah and whirled her around the room. The old nursery had been transformed into a schoolroom with a work table for them and a desk for Mrs Love. There was a large cupboard for their books and paintings, and the walls were adorned with maps and quotations.
‘Miss Lucy, please behave,’ said Sarah primly. ‘I cannot tolerate such unseemly behaviour.’ Her voice matched that of Mrs Masterson so well that Mrs Love turned away to hide a smile.
‘Am I still to instruct you in your lessons, Sarah?’ she enquired. ‘Or is this to be your free time?’
Sarah and Lucy both gasped, Sarah with dismay because she so enjoyed the lessons with Mrs Love, who knew the answers to practically everything and was so patient and kind.
Lucy rushed to Mrs Love and put her hand across the teacher’s mouth. ‘Oh, hush, please, Mrs Love. Don’t let’s ask. Let’s pretend that we hadn’t thought about it and continue as we are doing.’
Mrs Love agreed. She felt it a pity that Sarah should lose the opportunity of prolonging her education when she had the intelligence and understanding to absorb knowledge. And so, almost by mutual agreement, on the rare occasions when Mrs Masterson entered the schoolroom, Sarah would fold her arms across her knees and assume a slightly bored expression, or pick up a piece of sewing as if for all the world she was patiently waiting for Miss Lucy to conclude her lessons.
They put on their cloaks and stout boots one bright day during the following autumn and walked down the long winding drive to the village. The horse chestnut trees were shedding their leaves and a thick crisp carpet of brown and gold covered the ground and crackled beneath their feet.
Sarah waved to some of the women who looked out of the cottage windows as she and Lucy and Mrs Love passed by. She knew them all and they knew her. They had given her apples or plums or some other treat when she was small and had visited them with her mother or Ma Scryven.
‘Is tha well, Mrs Alsop?’ she called to an old woman, and beamed when she received a toothless, nodding reply.
Lucy turned up her nose and rebuked her for her coarse language, but Sarah shrugged and said nothing, though she caught an understanding glance from Mrs Love.
‘I want you to look for fossils and shells, Miss Lucy, and, Sarah, will you look at the cliffs and see what you can find?’
With a pocket full of shells, Lucy soon tired of searching and picked up instead the shiny, coloured pebbles that lay so prettily in the sand. Sarah thought that she had been given the less interesting project for there appeared to be nothing of interest in the wet clay. Thin rivulets of water ran down from the top of the cliff and formed shallow red pools on the sand. She climbed higher up the cliff, searching for a foothold in the muddy clay.
‘Don’t climb too high, Sarah,’ called Mrs Love and Sarah shook her head. She knew how far to climb and where to put her feet. Neither Mrs Love nor Lucy realized how familiar she was with this stretch of coastline.
This was her territory, where she came to be alone, to listen to and watch the sea. Where on warm summer evenings when the tide was coming in she would take off her dress and petticoat and clad only in her shift would wade out into the sea until the waves gently lifted her off her feet and she could no longer feel the sandy sea bed, and she would float as her father had taught her, and let the sea carry her on its back and deposit her on the shallow, sandy shore.
Sometimes she sank deep and let the waters wash over her, holding her breath until she felt lightheaded and dizzy, when her mind filled with illusions of insubstantial strangers who were vaguely familiar, who called to her, begging her to follow. She tried to reach them, but always on the point of contact, when her hand reached for theirs, they would slip away from her leaving her with an obscure sadness. Then she would rise out of the water, reaching for the surface with her arms held high and her lungs bursting.
One day this summer as she’d emerged from the water, her wet shift clinging to her body, she found Paul Reedbarrow standing by the water’s edge watching her, a sly grin on his face. She didn’t like him, though she knew he had once been a friend of Lizzie’s brother Jimmy. He seemed shifty and had made no attempt to move away, but stood staring at her, his mouth wet and slack in a foolish smile. She had put her dress on top of her wet shift, instead of drying herself in the sun, and climbed the cliff, her clothes and hair streaming. She hadn’t been down to the sands alone since, for she knew that he might be there, watching and spying.
‘There doesn’t seem to be much worth finding, Mrs Love,’ she called down. ‘Just a lot of soggy clay.’
‘There’s more than that if you look carefully,’ was the answer.
She continued to scrabble with her fingers, poking in the crevices, dislodging small pebbles and showering a sandy deluge down on to Mrs Love’s head.
‘I’ve found a piece of wood, but I can’t get it out. It looks like old driftwood, from a ship or something,’ she shouted. ‘Yes, and a piece of bone.’ She scraped around the edge of the object with a pebble. ‘Oh, no, I think – yes, it is, it’s a piece of claw, quite large, a gull perhaps, I can’t really tell.’
Enthusiastically she put her finds in her pocket and moved along the cliff, holding on to the tough sedge grass and sea lavender that sprouted out of pockets of wet clay.
‘Come on, Sarah! Haven’t we finished yet, Mrs Love?’ Lucy was bored. ‘I want my tea.’
‘I won’t be long.’ Sarah prodded and poked again, pulling out clumps of grass. ‘There’s something here. Oh, I wish that I had Tom’s knife with me, it would be so much easier.’ Then she remembered the pins in her hair. She took off her bonnet and removed one of the whalebone pins that were holding her hair in place. Her curls cascaded down her back and she threw the bonnet down on to the sands below.
‘I won’t be long now,’ she called, and with the sharp point of the pin she continued to scrape.
‘There,’ she said triumphantly as she slid down the cliff to where Lucy and their teacher were waiting. ‘Look at that!’ She held out her stained hands to show them her find.
‘Ugh, what is it?’ Lucy peered at her hand with a distasteful expression on her face. ‘It doesn’t look very nice.’
Mrs Love took it from her and examined it carefully. ‘It looks like a large tooth,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know what kind or from what.’
The colour was light and the edges were smooth and round. ‘Whatever it’s from,’ she said, ‘it has been there a long, long, time. Like the piece of driftwood it’s been washed there by the ocean at some distant time in history, and pounded into the clay. Or perhaps this part of the land was below the water during the great flood the Bible tells us of.’ She shook her head regretfully, ‘I fear that I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to tell.’
Sarah stared at the tooth, stroking and smoothing it with her fingers, her thoughts drifting away, h
er breath shallow. She heard the pounding of the waves and thought of the unknown creature immersed in the sea. Perhaps it had fought a losing battle here with some other stronger creature and its body had been left to batter against the coast; or maybe it had come to the end of its natural life miles out at sea, hundreds of years ago, and the tide eventually had carried it here, its bones mingling and becoming one with the grains of sand and particles of rock, but for the one tooth embedded in the cliffs for posterity.
The sound of the sea grew louder so that it filled her ears, banging against her eardrums; her vision became blurred and she swayed dizzily, she felt as though she was being carried along on a rushing, dipping bed of turbulent water and her legs trembled and crumpled beneath her.
‘Sarah! Oh, Sarah – Mrs Love, do something quickly. Sarah is ill.’ Lucy was frantic with alarm as she knelt over Sarah’s prostrate form.
‘It’s all right, she’s fainted, that’s all.’ Mrs Love gently patted Sarah’s face. ‘The climb up the cliff must have overtaxed her.’
Sarah stirred and her pale lips parted. ‘I’m all right,’ she said weakly. ‘Just let me rest a moment.’
Mrs Love looked around her at the long empty stretch of sand. ‘How to get her home is going to be a difficulty.’
‘I’ll go for help,’ Lucy said determinedly.
‘No!’ cried Mrs Love and Sarah simultaneously, both aware of the consequences should Mrs Masterson discover that Lucy was wandering the countryside alone, no matter what the purpose.
Sarah sat up and feebly brushed the sand from herself. ‘I shall be able to manage, really.’ She didn’t want a fuss, though she did feel a little weak. How silly of me, she thought, what a thing to do, fainting like that.
‘Look. Look. There’s Cousin John,’ Lucy jumped up and waved frantically to the figure above the cliff. ‘And your father, Sarah. Now all will be well. They will help us home.’
The old steps were long gone, though subsequent village children had attempted to make footholds for easier descent, and John slid and clambered down the slippery surface to assist them, the wet clay staining his clothes.
