by Pamela Bell
‘Maybe I could learn.’
‘You one of them suffragettes?’ Dot gave a crack of laughter. ‘Best learn how to make a cake first!’
She would not let Dot rile her, Maggie swore to herself, snapping the lid of the churn into place and taking hold of the handle. This was her life now. She was glad that her days were so full there was little time to mourn her father, although every time she passed the gate, she remembered him standing there, looking yearningly across the valley to High Moor.
It was easier when there was no time to think about the choice she had made, no time to remember Ralph and the desperation in his blue eyes.
She was up in the morning to clean out the range and light the fire. She emptied the chamber pot into the privy and drew water from the well. She helped Dot with the cooking. She fed the hens and collected the eggs. She dug potatoes. She made butter, she made cheese.
And at night she let Joe clamber on top of her. She listened to the creak and squeak of the bed springs as he shoved into her, her head turned on the pillow and her eyes tightly closed to blot out the image of Ralph reaching for her, Ralph’s hands cupping her face, Ralph’s lips warm against hers. ‘Let’s go away,’ he had said. ‘Today.’
She had said no. She was Joe’s wife and she would make the best of it.
Joe had been furious when George had told him that he was enlisting. ‘How am I supposed to run t’farm with just a halfwit like Frank to help me?’ he demanded that night.
‘Can Elijah not help with the sheep?’ Maggie had suggested while she washed the supper dishes.
Elijah had been Joe’s father’s shepherd, rewarded with a little cottage behind the farm when Orton Sugden had set off for Australia in 1908, and, it seemed, a thorn in Joe’s side.
‘That old wazzock! He’s ninety if he’s a day. Too decrepit to get off his arse.’
‘He must know a lot about sheep.’
‘I’m not worried about t’sheep,’ Joe snapped at Maggie. ‘I’m more concerned about t’weather.’ The long hot spell had broken the day war was declared, and he still had hay lying in the fields.
Carefully, Maggie put the plates back on the dresser, while Joe glared out at the rain. He would have to turn the hay again and dry it before he could stack it, and there was nothing he could do about it until the rain stopped. Of course, he should have finished cutting long ago while the grass was bone dry, but Maggie knew better than to say so.
Joe turned from the window. ‘I’m off out,’ he said abruptly.
‘In the rain?’
‘A bit of wet won’t hurt me, and there’s nowt else to do.’
Maggie dried her hands on the tea towel and watched her husband jam his cap on his head, turn up his collar and trudge out to the gate, which was still not fixed. Frank had eaten his supper, ducked his head in thanks and gone back to the stable where he slept in his little room in the loft.
She was alone. The light was so gloomy that she lit a paraffin lamp and watched it hiss into life. Then for want of anything better to do, she sat in one of the chairs on either side of the fireplace and picked up one of Joe’s shirts to mend. Toby settled on the rag rug and rested his head on her foot with a contented sigh.
Maggie moistened the end of the thread with her tongue and pushed it through the eye of the needle. She wished she could keep her mind as busy as her hands. Alone, it was too easy to think about Ralph, to wonder where he was, what he was doing.
Too easy to remember the despair in his voice. Leaving you before was like tearing off a part of me. Don’t ask me to do it again.
Too easy to imagine where they might have been if she had said yes instead of no. If she had simply taken his hand and never come back to Emmerdale Farm. If she hadn’t let pride in being someone who kept her promises stand in the way of happiness.
She could have been standing beside Ralph on a ship on their way to New Zealand instead of sitting in the dreary light sewing buttons on another man’s shirts.
At her feet, Toby twitched and dreamed, the warmth of his head on her foot a comfort. She could have taken him too.
It was Toby who heard Joe return. He sat up, soft ears cocked, long before Maggie caught the tell-tale scrape of the gate.
At first Maggie had no sense that anything was wrong. When Joe appeared in the doorway, his cap and shoulders spangled with rain, she got to her feet, putting her sewing aside and pressing her palms against her apron.
‘You’re wet,’ she said.
Joe didn’t move and she went towards him, intending to offer to take his coat and hang it up to dry, only to stop dead when she saw his ominously blank expression.
‘You lying little bitch,’ he said, quite quietly and her heart jolted in shock.
‘What is it?’ she stammered.
‘Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?’
Ice trickled down Maggie’s spine. She moistened her lips while Toby, picking up on her fear, crept beside her.
‘Find out what?’
‘You and Little Lord Fauntleroy, at it under the bridge.’
Maggie stiffened. ‘If you mean, Ralph, we weren’t “at it”.’
‘But you were there?’ Joe was dangerously calm but a muscle was jerking under his eye.
There was no point in pretending now. ‘Who told you?’
‘Ava Bainbridge saw you.’
‘How helpful of her,’ said Maggie tonelessly. ‘I bet she couldn’t wait to tell you all about it.’ Clenching her fists in her skirts, she took a steadying breath. ‘We were saying goodbye, that’s all.’
‘In the bushes under the bridge?’
The muscle was twitching uncontrollably now. Maggie couldn’t take her eyes off it.
‘Yes. I … Ralph asked me to go away with him but I told him that I couldn’t. That I was married to you. That it was the last time I would see him and that this would have to be goodbye.’
‘It’s a pity you didn’t remember that you were married to me before you slipped into the bushes with him, isn’t it?’ The rage in Joe’s voice was straining at the leash. ‘Do you take me for a fool?’ He stepped closer until he was nose to nose with Maggie, and the threatening pose made Toby growl low in his throat.
‘Do you expect me to believe that you weren’t at it like stoats under there?’
Keep your head up. Maggie forced herself not to step back but to look Joe calmly in the eye.
‘We were saying goodbye, that’s all,’ she insisted.
‘Liar!’ Joe’s fist shot out without warning and the blow sent Maggie reeling backwards as pain exploded in her head. As if from a great distance, she could hear Toby on the attack, snarling savagely as Joe cursed.
‘Bloody dog! Get off me!’
Desperately Maggie groped for something to drag herself upright. She had to get Toby to safety, but she could barely see and before she could clear her head she heard a terrible yelp and Joe steadily cursing.
‘I’m going to fix you once and for all.’
‘No … no,’ Maggie gasped, flailing to stop Joe as he stepped over her towards the gun cupboard. ‘Please, Joe, I’ll do anything …’
His only response was a vicious back-hander that knocked her back onto the floor. Her head cracked against the flagstones and darkness blotted everything else out. When she came round, Toby was standing over her, vibrating with aggression. His hackles were up, his ears flat, his lips drawn back in a warning snarl.
And Joe had a shotgun in his hand.
‘Toby, down boy,’ Maggie tried to croak but no words came out, or if they did, Toby was too far gone to hear her or obey. He was poised to spring for Joe’s throat.
‘No,’ Maggie tried again, sobbing with effort. ‘No, Toby.’
But it was too late. In ghastly slow motion, she saw Toby’s back legs brace to lift him off the floor and the next instant there was a huge bang, a scream and a thud as Toby crumpled onto the floor and the air reverberated with blood and horror.
Crawling towards the dog, ca
reless of the man standing over her with gun, Maggie fumbled to feel Toby’s heartbeat. Frantically, Maggie felt him all over, but there was no warm huffing breath from the black nose, no rise of his ribs, just a cold slackness to his limbs and, at last, a great sticky hole in his side where the bullet had hit him.
‘Toby!’ Maggie pressed her face into Toby’s ruff to muffle her scream of despair. ‘No, no, no!’
‘Get up!’ Joe shouted and she lifted her face to look at him, white with grief and disgust.
‘You’ve killed him!’
‘It bit me! It were savage!’
‘You’re the savage!’ she said in a trembling voice.
‘It had it coming,’ said Joe unrepentant. ‘Now, get up and get rid of it. I’m not sitting in here with that stinking carcass. Take it outside or I’ll put it on t’muck heap myself.’
‘Don’t touch him!’ Heaving in painful breaths, Maggie hauled herself to her knees and bent to gather Toby’s body in her arms. The dog was heavier than she expected, but somehow she got to her feet and staggered out into the rain with her burden.
For long moments she stood there, her face turned up to the rain, her mind blank with the horror of what had just happened.
Then she found a shovel and buried Toby down by the beck where he had liked to paddle in the peaty water. She was crying great, wrenching sobs of guilt and grief, weeping as she had never allowed herself to do for Andrew, for her father, or for Ralph.
This was where keeping her promises had brought her. No more, Maggie vowed. She would never forgive Joe for this, never. Tomorrow she would go to Miffield Hall and ask for Ralph. She would walk right up to the front door and demand to see him. She would tell him that she had changed her mind, that she would go away with him, tomorrow if need be. Next week they could be on their way to New Zealand and leave this wretched village and this wretched war behind them.
The thought gave her the strength to carry the shovel back up to the barn. Her hands were sticky with mud and blood. She rinsed them under the pump and then collapsed onto the straw, curling up to hug her arms around her. She was wet, cold, heartsick and so tired she could barely move. The barn was ripe with the smell of cows but she didn’t care. Anywhere was better than the house where Joe was.
When the door slammed open, she didn’t even look up. Joe stood over her, his hair wild, his eyes implacable.
‘So this is where you’re hiding. Get up.’
Maggie just shook her head and turned her face into the straw. ‘I can’t.’
‘You can and you will.’ Grabbing one arm, Joe jerked her upright and her legs gave way so that she slumped against him. ‘You’re going to get up and walk into the kitchen. Look at what your bloody dog did to me!’ He shoved his arm in front of her face. It was badly torn and bleeding.
‘Good,’ said Maggie.
‘What did you say?’
‘You killed Toby!’ Incoherent with rage and distress, Maggie beat at him with her fists, but she was too weak to hurt him. Joe dragged her back across the farmyard and threw her in through the kitchen door.
‘Now clean yourself up and get a bandage for my arm!’
‘No.’
Joe stared at her. She could imagine how she must look, her face drawn and streaked with mud, blood and tears, her hair matted with rain, but she didn’t care. She lifted her chin and the hatred and contempt in her face must have got through because he swung his fist at her again, grunting in satisfaction as she stumbled and fell over a stool.
‘You do as I say!’ he screamed at her.
Maggie shook her head dazedly, but her eyes when she lifted them to his were full of loathing. ‘No,’ she managed, coughing and spitting blood.
‘Do it!’
‘No.’
Drawing back his foot, he aimed a vicious boot at her side that sent her crashing back onto the floor tiles. ‘Do it, do it, do it!’ he grunted, kicking and kicking and kicking while pain bloomed all over Maggie’s body, in bursts of red and agonising white until finally, mercifully, blackness swooped down and blotted out her mind and she lay sprawled unconscious on the kitchen floor.
Chapter Seven
A pounding dragged Maggie out of a darkness so thick and viscous that it pressed against her chest and made every breath a struggle. Someone was banging on the door, but she couldn’t open her eyes properly, couldn’t seem to move at all. Dot would have to answer it. She lay very still, squinting through slitted eyes at a patch of rough whiteness.
The ceiling, Maggie realised at last. She was looking at the ceiling in the bedroom at Emmerdale Farm. Slowly she became aware that the pounding was inside her head and that pain was drumming through her, banging in her bones, knocking on her nerves, smouldering under her skin.
What had happened to her, she wondered in confusion. Feebly, she wriggled her fingers, felt the coarse cotton of a sheet. She was in bed, that seemed certain, but why couldn’t she move? A sense of doom slithered at the back of her mind. Something was terribly wrong. She had to get up.
Very, very carefully, she tried to lift her head from the pillow but even the smallest movement was enough to blot out her vision in a white burst of pain and with a whimper she sank back down.
But the movement had been enough to bring her memory back. It sliced through her like a knife through butter in cruel, vivid flashes: Joe’s fists, the gun. Toby’s snarl. His limp body.
Maggie’s throat closed with anguish. Toby was dead. Toby, who had been her constant companion through the griefs of the past. When Andrew died, when her father collapsed, when Ralph left … day after day, when Maggie woke here at Emmerdale Farm with Joe snoring by her side, Toby had been there, a quiet, trusting presence. His bright eyes had always been able to make Maggie smile, and the warmth of his body as he leant against Maggie had been a constant, wordless comfort.
And now he was lying in the wet earth.
Abruptly Maggie leant over the side of the bed and vomited with pain and memory.
When she heard Joe’s heavy tread on the stairs, she turned her face to the wall. She wasn’t afraid. Joe could do what he liked now. He couldn’t hurt her any more than he already had.
‘Ah, Christ!’ Joe exclaimed in disgust at the splash of vomit on the floorboards and stepped gingerly around it. ‘You awake then?’
Maggie didn’t answer.
There was a pause. Joe sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, and in spite of herself, Maggie tensed. Her whole body was a throbbing mass of pain and there was a redness behind her eyes.
‘Mebbe I went a bit far,’ Joe said grudgingly after a moment. ‘But what’s a man supposed to do when he hears his wife’s been seeing another man? Sit down at t’table and talk about it? I don’t know nobody who wouldn’t have taken the back of his hand to you in the same situation. You were asking for it.’
‘Toby wasn’t asking for it,’ she said, her voice barely a thread. ‘You killed him.’
‘What did you expect me to do? That were a vicious dog! About tore my arm to shreds,’ said Joe. ‘You can’t keep dog like that on a farm. If it could do that to me, what would it do to a sheep?’
Maggie refused to look at him. She was afraid she would be sick again if she did. ‘A sheep wouldn’t have been attacking me.’
‘The sooner you accept the way things are at Emmerdale Farm, the better it’ll be for you. You look a mess, but a few bruises won’t kill you.’ Slapping his meaty hands on his thighs, he pushed himself to his feet. ‘I know how to protect what’s mine. Accept that, and we’ll get along all right.’
He stepped over the vomit and lifted the latch. ‘Dot can come and clear up that mess.’
Maggie squeezed her eyes shut, listening to the sound of his boots on the wooden stairs. The red mass of pain was resolving itself into individual hurts. With her tongue, she probed her jaw where the blow from Joe’s fist seemed to have loosened a tooth. Breathing was agony and she suspected he had cracked a rib.
There was a dull, nagging ache low in h
er abdomen. It might have been from a kick – she had a vivid memory of a boot slamming into her as she lay on her face, lifting her up and over onto her back to leave her exposed before she could curl up small once more, so it might have been from that or from any of the other blows that had rained down on her. When she lifted her arm, she could make out ugly marks where his fingers had grabbed her and dragged her back to the farmhouse.
She hurt all over, but that burning sensation in her stomach, that wasn’t pain. That was rage. That was loathing. That was a determination to leave this house and this farm and this man who had killed Toby.
No more keeping her promises, Maggie vowed to herself. Oh, she’d keep her head high all right. She’d walk right through Emmerdale with it up. She would not be ashamed of leaving a man who beat her the way Joe did. The moment she could walk, she was going to find Ralph. She was going to tell him that she had changed her mind and she was leaving Beckindale for good.
It was a day before Maggie could stand up, two more before she could make it as far as the broken-down gate. She was breathless with pain by the time she made it there, and she clung to the top bar, white-faced. This time she looked deliberately right, to the chimneys of Miffield Hall. Ralph was there. She just had to be strong enough to walk a mile.
Dot’s eyes had slid away from her bruises but Maggie was sure that she had taken the news that Maggie Oldroyd had finally had her come-uppance down to the village. Ava Bainbridge would be lapping up that juicy piece of gossip! She would be delighted at the effect of her tittle-tattling to Joe. Maggie could just imagine Ava whispering behind her hand. That Maggie Sugden, Maggie Oldroyd as was, remember how proud she was? She’s not so proud now. Carrying on with Ralph Verney and her a married woman. Disgusting, I call it. Is it any wonder Joe Sugden’s taken his fists to her?
Maggie told herself that she didn’t care. Ava could say what she liked. She was going to New Zealand and leaving the gossip and the stares behind.
But first she had to get to Miffield Hall. It was a week before she was in any state to leave the farm, and she could feel Joe watching her. He must know how badly he wanted to escape. So Maggie bided her time and pretended that she could still barely walk, though the moment he was out of sight she would stretch and force her aching muscles to move again.
