by Valerie Wood
The house was quiet and restful. It smelt of beeswax and flowers, and she was saddened that she could only come here when Mrs Masterson and Lucy were away. Although she was happy in her cottage it was here at Garston in the spacious, handsome rooms that she felt as if she was at home; and soon, when she married Joe, she wouldn’t be allowed to come at all.
‘Sarah. How pleased I am to see you!’ Isaac sat propped up with cushions and his legs stretched out on a stool. ‘I can’t tell you how much pain I’m in with this dratted gout. Can you bathe my legs like you did last time?’
She did what she could for him, bathing his swollen toes and swathing his legs with comfrey leaves.
‘No, don’t go, please stay a little longer,’ he said as she prepared to leave. ‘I get so little company when Mrs Masterson and Lucy are away. Tell me all that you have been doing since last I saw you.’
She sat on a low stool beside him and talked of her garden and her visits to the market, and of Tom and the mill, of the difficulties of keeping down the price of flour and of the antipathy towards millers by the general public. He discussed with her the new Humber Dock which was being dug and which he hoped to buy shares in, and the continuing hazards of the whaling industry.
He patted her hand. ‘I have enjoyed our talk. Come again if you can. I wish—’ He stopped and scratched his sparse grey beard as he meditated, then shook his head ruefully. ‘Ah, well.’
‘Yes, sir?’ She waited, her brown eyes smiling fondly.
‘Nothing, Sarah. It doesn’t matter. It was just a fancy.’
She curtsied and left him. She hadn’t mentioned that she was going to be married. She wanted John to be the first to know, although she suspected that Joe had already told his father, who in turn had told Will, for her father had put his arm around her shoulder the last time she had seen him and had spoken of his friendship with Martin Reedbarrow and what a good solid Holderness family they were.
‘Just as we will be, Sarah, given time. Starting with our Tom and his son. ’First Foster to be born here.’
‘No, Fayther. I was the first, don’t forget!’ she had objected vehemently, and her eyes flashed. Her father looked at her in surprise.
‘Aye, well, I meant on ’male side. Women change their names when they wed, and if tha should decide—’ He trailed off indecisively.
She had put her chin in the air and said defiantly, ‘I would still be a Foster, Fayther, nothing can change that, ever.’
Gratified, he laughed. ‘That’s ’spirit, Sarah. Tha’s a Foster all right. Tha’s got red hair and temper to prove it.’
She waited by the old church each evening as dusk was falling, when the treetops stood out in shadowy silhouette against the darkening sky and the horizon was lost in a roke of grey.
On the fourth evening, as the dusk was turning to darkness and she was about to return home, she saw him walking below her on the sands. He raised his hand and smiled and she knew with sinking despair how her news would wipe away the smile from his face and bring him only misery.
She scrambled down the cliffs before he could attempt to come up to her and as she came to the bottom of the incline he reached up to help her, lifting her into his arms and holding her there. He kissed her tenderly, her face, her lips, then with a groan he drew her to him, bending her willing body to his.
‘I’ve missed you so much, Sarah. I want you so much that it hurts.’
Unable to resist she arched her neck towards him and he kissed the long line of her throat, running his hands over her, feeling the shape of her body beneath her gown.
‘I love you, love you, love you,’ she whispered as her body melted against his. The words echoed in his ears with the pounding of the waves.
‘Don’t ever leave me again, Sarah. I am nothing without you,’ he implored softly. ‘My life, my being, it is nothing if you are not there to share it with me.’
Safe in his arms, she dreamily watched as a bright, white moon appeared in the night sky, highlighting a drift of clouds, touching their downy edges with silver. But as the sands turned white by its light, she felt their sharpness beneath her, and reality reasserted itself as if the moon had illuminated her mind, reminding her that her path led elsewhere and that she was promised to someone else.
She whispered her news haltingly to him and he stared, disbelieving.
‘I will always love you, John,’ she cried, clutching his hand. ‘Even though I can’t be with you. Even though we must live our lives apart, we’ll be together. Nothing can separate us. We belong to one another – in spirit and mind, if not in body.’
Angrily he pushed her away. ‘How can you say that? How can you join your life to someone else without thinking of me?’ He seized her shoulders violently. ‘I can’t wait until the great hereafter and live in Hell now. I need you, Sarah.’
She wept, sobs shaking her body. ‘How I wish this was another time; another place, when perhaps it wouldn’t matter who we were. When we might not have to bow down to convention or society’s rules, when we could please ourselves only and not think of others!’
‘You’re fooling yourself, Sarah, there will never be such a time. There will always be prejudice and narrow-mindedness, but it has to be faced, to be met head on, otherwise we’re lost.’ He pleaded with her. ‘We can face it together, you and I.’
She shook her head. ‘I was too afraid, and now it’s too late. I’ve made a promise that I must keep.’
She reached out to him, imploring him to understand, but he stormed away from her and stood at the water’s edge watching the waves as they broke softly on the sand.
‘And what about me?’ He spoke quietly as if all the fight had gone out of him.
She put her fingers over her lips and breathed softly, ‘Marry Miss Pardoe, John. She’ll be a fine wife for you.’ Tears ran down her cheeks.
‘What? What did you say?’ By chance his fingers had closed on the letter that was in his pocket.
‘Marry Miss Pardoe. She’ll be good for you, she’s kind and beautiful and she cares about you.’
He strode back to face her and pulled her up from where she crouched on the sand. ‘I’ll make my own decisions, and I’m making one now. I’m going away, I was coming to tell you when I received your message. I’m sailing to the Arctic. I shall be too busy trying to stay alive to even think about you.’
He took her head in his hands, kissed her fiercely and then held her at arms’ length. ‘We shan’t meet again, don’t you or your intended bridegroom worry about that, but I’ll tell you this, Sarah. You’ll see me in your sleep and in every waking moment. When you are lying in his arms you’ll feel me there between you. You will never be rid of me, not if you live to be a hundred. You will never have any peace, not in this world or the next, I promise you.’
She stood watching as he walked swiftly away, his long strides making deep footprints in the damp sand. She watched until a prominence of broken clay ridges hid him from view, and then she slowly turned to make her solitary ascent back up the moonlit cliff.
John let the heavy door close with a bang, bringing Janey hurrying out of the kitchen.
‘Oh, Mr John.’ She took his cape from him. ‘We’ve kept supper hot for you. Master’s gone to bed but he asked would you go up as soon as you’ve eaten?’
‘Bring a couple of bottles of wine and some cheese to Mr Masterson’s room, nothing more.’ His voice was brusque, and she dipped her knee and gazed at him anxiously. ‘I shan’t require anything else, thank you. Don’t wait up.’
He climbed the stairs two at a time. He intended to get drunk, so drunk that he wouldn’t remember anything of this evening. Not the sweetness of her lips and the drowning depths of her eyes. Not the consuming jealousy he felt that she was to marry that hulking farmhand. He couldn’t bear the thought of him laying his great body next to hers, crushing her fragile form beneath his.
He might take her body but he’ll never possess her mind, her thoughts, he told himself wretchedly, but he kne
w that it wasn’t enough; he couldn’t comprehend that he would never see her again, that she was gone from him for ever.
He staggered into his uncle’s room, already half drunk with emotion, and Isaac looked up irritably from his bed where he lay snug beneath a fur rug, his nightcap pulled about his ears. ‘What the devil are you up to? Where have you been? Janey said that you had arrived and then gone straight out again, and now you come crashing in, waking all the household!’
It didn’t matter that the household consisted only of himself and the servants. Isaac did not like his tranquillity disturbed in such a manner. ‘Are you drunk?’
‘Not yet, sir, but I intend to be, that is if you will allow me the facilities of your cellar. I’ve taken the liberty of sending down for some wine.’
‘Hmph. Most of it’s yours anyway. I’m not allowed to drink the stuff with this dratted gout.’ Isaac adjusted his cap and pulled his rug around him. ‘You’d better tell me what’s going on.’
John paused as Janey came in with the cheese and wine and some bread which she had brought as an afterthought. It was not like Mr John to refuse his supper.
‘I don’t know that I want to discuss it, Uncle,’ he muttered after she had gone. ‘Sufficient to say that I have had a great disappointment and that I am feeling as low as it is possible for a man to be.’
He poured a glass of wine and drank it quickly. The sooner he was drunk the better. ‘I came to tell you that I am going to London for a few days, but that I shall be back in time for the Northern Star’s sailing.’
‘Why you should want to go away on this trip anyway, I can’t fathom,’ Isaac said grumpily. ‘You know I can’t get to the office just now.’
‘Another two weeks and you’ll feel better, the doctor told you that, and anyway the staff are perfectly capable of running the company for a few weeks.’ He poured another glass of wine and Isaac watched him curiously.
‘I need to get away and I’m curious about this trip. The captain reckons on pushing further north to follow the whales, and I’d like to be there if he’s going into uncharted territory. We have to think of the men’s safety as well as the profits.’
‘If you’re going to London you might look in on Isobel and Lucy. Find out when they are coming back.’
John hesitated, he’d forgotten that his relatives were in London. ‘Are they staying with the Pardoes again?’
‘They’ve rented a house so as not to be an inconvenience to Miss Pardoe!’ Sulkily he watched as John drank his wine. ‘Isobel even wants me to buy a property down there so that they can go down every season, so that Lucy can meet the right company.’
He looked longingly at the wine bottle. ‘Pour me just one glass, there’s a good fellow. Just one can’t hurt.’
He sipped the red wine appreciatively. ‘I think I deserve some comfort if my wife and daughter have deserted me.’
‘That’s the trouble with our ladies.’ John slurred over his words and poured more wine, slopping it on to the carpet. ‘They always desert us when we need them most. That’s my trouble, Uncle, I’ll confide in you. I’ve been deserted.’
Isaac drummed silently on the counterpane with his gnarled fingertips and waited with narrowed eyes for the outburst. When it came it was with a rush, a torrent of words, of broken sentences and verbal confusion.
‘And you say she won’t have you, this woman?’ asked Isaac. ‘Is this the same woman you had in mind once before? The one without a dowry?’
John nodded. He was spent, drained of all feeling.
‘And she’s a married woman, is she?’ Isaac hadn’t quite got the drift of his ramblings.
‘Not yet, but she soon will be. She’s promised.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘Oh God! Sarah, how am I to live without you?’
‘Sarah? She’s called Sarah, is she?’ The old man sighed deeply. ‘It’s a good name for a woman.’
Something in John’s eyes as he looked up alerted him and Isaac frowned, biting his lips apprehensively. ‘You don’t mean it’s our Sarah – not Sarah Foster?’
‘The same, Uncle. There is only one as far as I am concerned.’
John sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. The oblivion he had hoped for in drunkenness had not come, he was as sober as a judge now, and more despondent than ever. When he opened his eyes to look at his uncle tears were streaming down the old man’s face, running down his wrinkled cheeks and wetting his beard.
‘Uncle?’ He knelt beside him. ‘What is it, sir? Are you ill? I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.’
‘You’re a fool, John! Why did you not say that it was Sarah you loved? Sarah, who we both love.’ The old man put his head in his hands and wept. ‘You know that one day all of this will be yours, if you want it. Isobel won’t stay here once I’m gone. And Sarah, she would have been happy here. Sarah, who would have cared for me now that I’m old and ill – cared as no-one else would. And now she’s gone, lost to us – both of us.’
He woke at the first pencil glow of daybreak, dressed and left the house as the servants were stirring, surprising them as, sleepy-eyed, they unlocked the door and let him out. He rode away from Monkston towards town, his back turned to the brushstrokes of colour which appeared in the eastern sky, as darkness fled and the virgin day stretched out its bright rays.
He packed his valise quickly at his High Street home, and changed horses, leaving his mare and taking a strong stallion, for he intended to ride fast for the two hundred miles to London.
He stopped over in Lincoln and Sleaford, paying well for the hire of other mounts at inns there, and arrived at the Pardoes’ door dirty, aching and weary, having punished himself and his sweating horses by his hard riding. He had barely given thought to the question of why Matilda Pardoe should have written asking him to call on her, except to reflect curiously that it was strange that she should wish to see him now at a time when Sarah told him that he ought to marry her.
He washed, changed his clothes and went downstairs. One of the footmen greeted him and showed him through to the withdrawing room where Miss Pardoe would join him.
‘Is Mr Stephen Pardoe at home?’
‘No, sir. Mr Stephen is out of town at present, as is Mr Pardoe.’
He waited seated for a few moments, and then got up restlessly and examined the paintings on the wall. It was odd, he thought, that Miss Pardoe had invited him to stay when there didn’t appear to be any other guests and when her father and brother were absent.
He bowed as she came into the room. She was poised and smiling as she greeted him with thanks for coming so swiftly after receiving her letter.
‘It was not a question of life or death, Mr Rayner, but a matter that I would like settled fairly soon. Please, take a seat. You look very tired, I fear that the journey has overtaxed you?’
‘Not at all, Miss Pardoe. I came immediately, as I am to sail to the Arctic very shortly, and it may be many months before I return.’
He watched her as she seated herself across from him. Sarah was right, she would make someone a good wife. She was handsome and charming, and he felt sure that she would take an intelligent interest in her husband’s affairs. And yet there was something missing, some spark or warmth, perhaps waiting to be kindled.
‘My aunt will be joining us for supper,’ she said, as if reassuring him that they would not be dining alone, ‘but I wished to speak with you privately, which is why I asked you to come whilst my father and brother are away.’
She took a deep breath and looked away. John detected a small movement in her throat as if she was nervously swallowing.
‘I have decided to marry,’ she said firmly and John’s eyebrows rose in surprise. He had not heard a whisper of the news.
‘My father is anxious for grandchildren to continue our family line, and as my brother does not appear to be in any hurry to be married and produce a family, I have decided to take matters into my own hands.’
Her cheeks flushed slightly and John realized that for some reas
on this was not an easy subject for her. He therefore kept his eyes averted, gazing at the paintings and the windows, and just occasionally glancing in her direction.
‘You may have heard, as I well know how this type of gossip travels, that I have refused several offers of marriage. My reasons for this are personal, but I can tell you that I have not previously met anyone with whom I wish to share the rest of my days.’
She got up from the chair and walked across to the window, gazing out of the gauze curtains into the street below.
John too stood up and waited hesitatingly for her to continue.
‘This is quite difficult for me, Mr Rayner, so you must excuse me if I do not phrase my words well.’
She turned to face him and although the cold white light was behind her, throwing her face into shadow, he could see the flush on her cheeks. ‘The fact is, I have a proposition to offer you. If you do not think it presumptuous of me and if you have not already any commitments in this direction, I would ask if you would give serious consideration to taking me as your wife?’
He drew in his breath. What it must have cost her to ask such a question he couldn’t begin to consider. After a moment he took her hand and led her to a chair, thinking that perhaps she might be feeling the strain of embarrassment, but once seated she sat upright, her hands folded calmly across her lap.
‘You see, Mr Rayner, of all the gentlemen I have met, you are the only one that I would consider as a suitable companion, and if you will excuse my plainness of speech, as a prospective father of my children.’
John was lost for words, he wasn’t sure whether he should be flattered, for she was an extremely eligible heiress, or, and this he felt more likely, simply to regard himself as a participant in a joint transaction. That this was the way things were often regarded he was quite well aware, but surely not in such a calculated or direct manner?
