‘If the keeper’d known that nest was there, I reckon he’d have smashed the eggs.’
‘Why would he?’ Ellen cried.
‘Because of the fish, I suppose,’ he said.
‘Surely there are enough for everybody?’
‘I shan’t say nothing, anyway. I like to see the coot here, larking about.’
And, crouching beside her, he showed her how cleverly the nest was loose-tied to two or three upright reeds so that, when the river rose, the nest rose with it and escaped flooding.
‘You tell your uncle there’s six in the brood, all of ’em swimming and doing well. He’ll be glad to hear that. It’ll cheer him up. He was always down here, before he got sick, watching them birds and making notes. You tell him the kingfisher’s here as well. I seen it a day or two, like a streak.’
‘Yes, I’ll tell him,’ Ellen said.
She was often at the river after that, and Richard soon got into the way of looking out for her. Both were lonely and both were older than their years. There was soon an understanding between them. Once Ellen was caught in a storm and took shelter with him in the mill, and while they leant together over the hatch-door, looking out at the white rain, he talked of marriage.
‘I can’t afford a wife just yet. I’m only just getting on my feet. There’s a lot to do before I can think of such a step. I daresay it might be two or three years.’
‘I couldn’t leave Uncle John, either. I promised I’d stay with him till the end. I hope that won’t be for ages yet, though he’s in such terrible pain sometimes ‒’
‘You must certainly stop with him, no doubt of that. It’d break his heart if you left him alone with that mother of yours. She’d have him in the grave in no time at all.’
‘Hush!’ Ellen said. ‘You mustn’t say such things. She’s not that bad.’
‘Ent she indeed! She’s bad enough! And if it warnt for your poor old uncle, I’d up and marry you tomorrow morning, just to get you away from her. But as it is, we must just be patient, and make our plans accordingly.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we must be patient.’
They had known each other for five weeks, but it was taken for granted between them, quietly, without surprise, that their lives were linked and always would be.
Ellen’s mother did not approve of Richard Lancy. Meeting him, she was barely civil, and behind his back she was often contemptuous.
‘A miller!’ she said. ‘Why not throw yourself away on a road-mender and be done with it? I will certainly not receive him here!’
But Ellen’s uncle took Richard’s part. ‘This is my house, remember, Adelaide, and Dick Lancy will always be welcome in it, at least so long as I am alive.’
He and Richard got on well together. The old man trusted the younger one and towards the end, when he grew more frail, it was Richard who carried him to bed at night and who came every morning to put him into his chair by the window.
‘You’ve been like a son to me, my boy, and Ellen has been like a darling daughter. Take care of her, after I’m gone, and don’t let Adelaide bully her.’
Uncle John died in June, 1873, and Ellen married Richard in July. Mrs. Wainwright was disgusted. There should have been a year’s mourning at least, but to have the wedding within a month ‒! She washed her hands of the whole affair. Victory Cottage was now hers and no wedding-breakfast should take place there. Nor would she be present in church.
So the wedding-breakfast took place at Pex Mill and the little parlour was so crowded with well-wishers that they overflowed into the garden, and young Simon Shaw, playing the fool out on the footbridge, fell with a splash into the mill-race and had to be rescued by Will Gale, the smith, no less tipsy than himself.
‘Drink up by all means,’ Richard said. ‘There’ll be little drinking done in this house after today, ’cos Ellen and me is both teetotal.’
Indeed, it was noticed that he himself touched not a drop, and his wedding-guests could guess the reason. It was drink that had hastened his father’s ruin.
‘You can’t be teetotal and live in Dingham,’ said George Danks of Cockhanger Farm. ‘Not when it’s got two inns to support.’
‘Teetotal or not I wish you good health and prosperity,’ said Bob Dyson, raising his glass, ‘and may your waterwheel never stop turning.’
‘He’ll prosper all right,’ said Michael Bullock. ‘Did you ever know of a poor miller?’
‘I knew a poor miller’s daughter once …’
‘Any man will prosper,’ said Joe Dancox, ‘so long as he has a good wife behind him.’
‘Wedlock’s a padlock,’ said Simon Shaw. ‘It’s a brave man that turns the key.’
Just after sunset when a pink moon hung in the sky, the noisy revellers at last went home. The mill and the millhouse became silent and Ellen, at the kitchen window, stood listening to the quiet sounds of the river: the plopping of fish in the millpond; the fluttering of water-fowl among the reeds; and, in the distance, the rush of the weir. These sounds were now her life. They would fill all her wandering thoughts by day and her dreams by night, heard and yet not heard, like her own heartbeats or the drumming of blood between her ears.
‘Quiet, ent it now they’re gone?’ Richard said, coming into the room.
‘Yes, quiet,’ Ellen said. ‘I can hear the Abbey clock striking.’
‘Can you? Golly? That’s all of three miles. Did it strike the quarter? Then our clock is slow.’
He went to the tall grandfather clock and put it right. Then he turned and stood watching her as she leant at the window, a dark outline against the violet-coloured sky.
‘I reckon there’s going to be a storm. The wind is as hot as a drunkard’s breath and I’m damn near melting in this suit.’
‘Perhaps a storm will clear the air.’
Ellen came away from the window and they looked at each other in the fading light.
‘Shall I light a candle?’ Richard said.
‘No need for candles,’ Ellen said, ‘it isn’t really dark yet.’
The moon, now whitening, lit them to bed.
Soon after the wedding, Ellen’s mother sold Victory Cottage and bought a house in Lyme Regis, as far away from Worcestershire as she could well manage. The day she left Dingham, she called at the mill in a hired carriage, and handed down a bundle of clothes. Ellen never saw or heard of her again.
Old Captain Wainwright had left Ellen sixty pounds and as soon as the money was in her hands she went to Sutton Crabtree on a secret errand. Three weeks later, as arranged, a brand new waggon drew up at the mill, with a strong grey horse between the shafts, driven by Gleddow, the Sutton wheelwright. Ellen went to the mill-door and called Richard.
‘I can’t come now ‒ I’m busy!’ he said, shouting above the noise of the mill.
‘You must come!’ Ellen said. ‘You’ll be sorry if you don’t!’
Richard followed her out to the road, wiping his hands on his apron. His scowl deepened when he saw the waggon, ‒ he thought it was somebody asking the way ‒ but as he drew close and saw its newness, he began to perceive what was afoot. The waggon was painted dark green, its chamfered panels picked out in yellow, the rims of its wheels fine-lined with black. And along its shafts, dark green on yellow, Richard read his own name: Richard Lancy; Miller and General Dealer: Pex Mill, Dingham, nr. Rainborough, Worcs.
‘Would you believe it!’ he kept saying, walking round the horse and waggon. ‘Would you ever in God’s name … Oh, I shall be somebody, driving this!’ And, after Gleddow had gone, he said: ‘Seems I was onto a good thing, Nell, when I married you!’
‘It’s only right that a miller should have a horse and waggon. How can you carry on your trade with only a couple of old donkeys?’
‘I’m not just a miller,’ Richard said. ‘I’m a miller and a General Dealer. That’s what you got them to put on them shafts, and very well it looks, too.’
His pride in the horse and waggon was boundless. He kept them always in perfect c
ondition. And the fact that Ellen should have spent her legacy in such a way moved him deeply. But there was one matter arising out of the gift that was less pleasing. She made him give the two donkeys away.
‘You don’t need them now. You’ll never have to use them again. So why not give them to someone in need?’
‘Dammit, woman, I can always sell them! The money would pay for that new hursting. I ent so rich that I can afford to give things away.’
‘Just this once you can,’ she said. ‘Just this once, to please me.’
So the two donkeys were given away: one to Old Trussler, the fishmonger, whose pony had only recently died; the other to Mr. and Mrs. Grey, to pull their little home-made cart, so that they could take their invalid daughter for drives.
‘Don’t thank me,’ Richard said, parting with the donkeys. ‘It was my wife’s idea, not mine.’
The matter rankled for a long time, though he managed to turn it into a joke.
‘I seen one of my neddies in Sturton this morning. He don’t look too happy, delivering fish. I hardly knew how to meet his eye. I reckon he liked it a lot better when he worked for a miller and general dealer!’
In September, 1874, their son was born, and they called him John after Ellen’s uncle. Richard was a proud and boastful father. There was nobody like this baby son. No one so forward, so clever, so strong. And his customers often felt the urge to take him down a peg or two.
‘Is he talking yet, Dick, that boy of yours?’
‘Talking? Dammit! He ent hardly more’n eight weeks old!’
‘Oh, he’s only an ordinary baby after all, then. From what you’d said, I thought he’d be keeping your books for you by now!’
In November that year, something unusual happened to Richard. He spent an evening in The Old Tap and got very drunk. The landlord, Archie Shaw, had wanted an old cattle-trough for his stableyard, and Richard as always had known where to find one. The night he delivered it, the weather was cold and wet, and when the trough had been unloaded, Shaw invited him inside and together they shared a bottle of brandy.
Richard, unused to strong drink, was soon helpless, and Will Gale, the blacksmith, a regular customer at The Old Tap, volunteered to take him home. Ellen, waiting anxiously, heard the horse and waggon coming, and the two men’s voices upraised in song. She also heard the commotion they made as they bedded down the horse in his stall. Then Richard stumbled into the kitchen, looked at her with rolling eyes, and fell insensible at her feet. Will Gale stood grinning in the open doorway.
‘One handsome husband delivered safe and sound to his wife,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to pay, though I wouldn’t say no to a little nightcap.’
‘Safe and sound?’ Ellen said, stooping to loosen Richard’s collar. ‘Do you call this safe and sound?’
‘He’s all in one piece, surely? No broken bones? Nothing wrong that a night’s sleep won’t cure?’
‘What use he? You tell me that!’
‘It all depends what you had in mind.’
‘If there’s one thing I detest,’ Ellen said, ‘it’s the sight of a man in a drunken stupor.’
‘Me too,’ Will said. ‘I’ll help you to get him up to bed.’
‘Thank you, no! Just leave him be.’
‘Maybe you’re right. He’s better lying as he is. He won’t be much company for you tonight, though he’ll need your sympathy in the morning.’
‘He won’t get it!’ Ellen said. ‘And I’ll say goodnight to you now, Mr. Gale, while I’ve still got patience enough to be polite.’
‘Don’t I get no nightcap, then?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘you’ve had enough.’
She moved to the door and pushed it against him. Will fell back a few paces, still with a foolish grin on his face, and, finding himself shut out in the rain, hammered three or four times on the door.
‘Mrs. Lancy, ma’am, you’re a damned shrew! Thank God I’m a single bachelor chap and can come and go as I damn well please! I never knowed a woman yet that hadn’t got rennet in her veins!’
Will went off singing and his heavy footsteps pounded the bridge. Ellen lit a storm-lantern and went out to see that all was well with the horse in his stall. She returned to the kitchen, where Richard, except that he snored loudly, lay on his back as though dead. She covered him over with a blanket and went up to bed. Baby John lay asleep in his cot.
In the morning, Richard was surly and sick-faced. He went to his work without any breakfast. At twelve o’clock, when he came in to dinner, he fidgeted with his knife and fork and eyed Ellen, who ate in silence.
‘Well, woman?’ he said at last ‘Has the cat got your tongue?’
‘What is it you want me to say?’
‘Hells bells! It’s the first time it’s ever happened!’
‘I hope it’s the last,’ Ellen said. ‘I hadn’t bargained for a drunken husband.’
‘You can be sure it’s the last,’ he said. ‘There’s no pleasure in drinking for me. My head is boiling like a kettle.’ A sudden thought came to him as he thumped the table.
‘Archie Shaw is a fly devil! He never paid me for that trough. I shall have to see him about that.’
But although he went to The Old Tap again, to collect his money, he could not be persuaded to take a drink.
Cast a Long Shadow by Mary E. Pearce is published this autumn exclusively on Amazon. For updates go to:
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