The Land Endures (The Apple Tree Saga Book 4)

by Mary E. Pearce

  But Linn, alone in the house with him, was filled with a sudden choking fear. The way he stood seemed to threaten her. His broad bulky body filled the hearth. She set down her basket and turned towards the door. Challoner quickly followed her. He took her by the shoulders and swung her round and when, more by chance than by design, one of his hands caught the front of her blouse, he thrust it inside to cover her breasts, squeezing her flesh most painfully between his big fingers, rough-skinned and hard. It was not what he had intended, but, once having touched her, he was inflamed. He spoke to her in a thickened voice.

  ‘What’re you running away for? Why don’t you stop and give me a chance?’

  ‘No, let me go, for pity’s sake!’

  As Linn writhed away from him, freeing herself, her fear and disgust were so extreme that they blazed out of her, uncontrolled.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ she cried in a shrill voice. ‘Don’t touch me with your big ugly hands!’

  Challoner stared. He became very still. He saw the loathing in her eyes.

  ‘My God,’ he said, incredulously, ‘I wonder what you think you are?’

  ‘I may be your servant but I’m not your whore!’

  ‘You can’t always have been nice! That boy of yours is proof of that!’

  ‘Oh, I knew very well enough what was in your mind!’

  ‘You lived with Tom Maddox, didn’t you? Brazenly, for all to see? You made yourself the talk of the place! ‒ Do you think I don’t remember it? And what were you then, living with him? Were you his servant or his whore?’

  ‘I loved him,’ Linn said. ‘You’ll never make me ashamed of that.’

  ‘You were never his wife, though, were you, by God? You were never any man’s wife so far. Well, let me tell you something, madam! You with your talk about being a whore! If you hadn’t been so quick off the mark ‒ if you hadn’t jumped to the wrong conclusion ‒ if you hadn’t shown yourself up for what you are ‒ I was going to ask you to be my wife! Yes, madam, you can stare! That’s brought you up short a bit, I can see.’

  ‘Your wife? You must be mad!’ Linn said. At another time she would not have believed him. Now she hardly knew what she said. Her physical revulsion against the man gave her tongue a cruel edge. ‘Did you really think I would marry you? A man of your age with grown up sons? Did you think I was yours just for the asking, because I’m a servant in your house?’

  ‘I hope you’ve finished now!’ he exclaimed. ‘I hope you’ve said all you’ve got to say.’

  Challoner’s face was an ugly red. His rage brought a wetness to his eyes. But Linn, as she recovered herself, saw that he was deeply hurt. She saw him as a foolish, self-deceived man, and fleetingly she was sorry for him. She wished she could call back some of the things she had said to him. But it was too late; she knew he would never forgive her now; and a new terror arose in her for, having offended him like this, her own job and her father’s would be at stake.

  ‘Mr Challoner,’ she began. ‘Mr Challoner, I’m sorry it’s all turned out as it has.’

  ‘Sorry, are you? I can well believe that!’

  ‘Do you want me to leave the house?’

  ‘It’s up to you. You can please yourself.’

  ‘I don’t want to lose my job.’

  ‘No, nor lose your father his!’ Watching her, he became sly. He knew what fears tormented her. There was a sneer in his voice. ‘You need the money, I daresay, and I shouldn’t like to see you starve. You’ve got your boy to think about. Your little love-child. Your little mistake.’

  Abruptly he made towards the door.

  ‘You can stay on by all means, and when you’re doing your bits and bobs of chores about the place, you can be thinking this to yourself. ‒ You could have been mistress of this house if only you’d played your cards the right way. Your little boy could have had my name. I could have done a lot for him and sent him to a good school. You just think what you’ve thrown away!’

  The door slammed, and he was gone. Linn sat down, trembling, in a chair and rested her elbows on the table, but before she could yield to the threatening tears, Robert returned from the village shop. He had not spent his threepence on liquorice laces; he had bought a small tortoiseshell comb for his mother to wear clipped in her hair.

  Challoner never touched her now, but he kept a close watch on her just the same, and whereas before he had been full of praise, now he found fault with everything.

  ‘Do you call these clean?’ he said, flinging his boots down in front of her. ‘You’ll have to do better than that, by God, before they’re fit for market wear.’

  There was far more washing to do now. Challoner changed his shirt every day. And whereas before, on washday mornings, the young lad Godwin had brought in the coal, now she had to do it herself. She had to pump all the water and carry it in, and chop her own sticks to light the fire. Gerald soon noticed the change in his father’s manner to her. He wanted to know what was wrong.

  ‘Never you mind!’ Challoner said. ‘The girl is a bitch, I can tell you that. I was never so taken-in in my life.’

  ‘She can’t be as bad as all that, surely?’ It was easy enough for Gerald to guess what lay behind the change. ‘You’ll drive her away if you treat her like this.’

  ‘Hah! Not her! She wants the money too much for that. She said so herself.’

  Out in the fields, as wet as ever, harvest progressed with dreadful slowness. The sight of the sprouting, smut-blackened corn, mouldering as it stood in the shocks, did nothing to improve Challoner’s temper. Once he came into the farmyard when Linn was carrying buckets of kitchen-waste to the boiler-house next to the piggery.

  ‘Kitty Cox always used to give a hand out in the harvest-field,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’re too refined for that?’

  ‘I can’t do everything,’ Linn said.

  She bore his treatment as best she could. He would surely not keep it up for long. But his spite was not so easily assuaged; instead of lessening, it grew; he was determined to have his revenge. One day he took her out to the barn and set her to pluck two dozen fowls. They had to be ready by seven o’clock, he said, and it was then just after two. It took her till eight to pluck them all, and her hands by that time were red and raw, the finger-tips bleeding, too sore to touch. Robert played outside in the yard. He came into the barn when she was trussing up the fowls. Her hands were so sore she could hardly bear to handle the string. Robert helped her to tie the knots.

  At home that evening, preparing supper, she wore a pair of cotton gloves.

  ‘What’s wrong with your hands?’ Jack asked.

  ‘It’s some kind of rash,’ she said, shrugging, and to her relief he asked no more.

  He took little interest, apparently, in the work she did for Challoner. He never asked her how she got on. He rarely mentioned it at all. But once he said sarcastically: ‘When’s he sending someone to fix up the roof? I thought you’d arranged it, you and him.’

  Whatever Challoner told her to do, she did without a word of complaint. But what caused her anguish, secretly, was that Robert should witness the humiliations heaped upon her. It was nothing that he saw her scrubbing floors, but that he should see her emptying the latrine, struggling to carry the big slopping bucket across the yard and down the track, to tip it into the piggery midden: she hated Challoner for this. That in front of the little wide-eyed boy the man should fling his gaiters at her and send a tin of saddle-soap rattling across the table to her, and should say in his loud contemptuous voice, ‘You won’t take all day at that job, I hope? ‒ I’m going out at ten sharp!’: she hated Challoner for these things.

  The depth of the hatred she felt for him sometimes shocked her and made her afraid. Following him out to his motor car once, carrying a hamper filled with game, she was shocked at the picture that filled her mind, of the motor car skidding on the wet road and the man lying dead across the wheel. What sort of woman had she become, that she could wish someone dead? she thought. But her greatest fear of a
ll was that Jack should learn of the way Challoner treated her.

  ‘Don’t tell your granddad that I empty the privy up at the farm,’ she said to Robert one day. ‘It’s better for him if he doesn’t know. Promise Mummy you won’t tell?’

  Robert nodded, giving his promise. She knew she could trust him, young as he was.

  But it so happened, the following day, that as she was carrying the latrine bucket across the yard, her father came through the gate from the pasture, leading a horse that had gone lame.

  ‘What’s this?’ he said, coming to her, and she set down the bucket to ease her arm. ‘Where’s the lad that does these jobs?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Linn said. She looked round the yard in a vague way, as though expecting Godwin to come.

  ‘How long have you been doing jobs like this?’

  ‘Father, don’t make a fuss!’ she cried, for the look in his face was frightening, and she knew that Challoner was in the barn. ‘It’s no concern of yours what I do. Just leave me to manage my own affairs.’

  ‘That bastard’s been putting on you, by God! D’you think I ent seen it in your eyes? D’you think I ent seen you dwindling away to a nottomy streak these past few weeks? D’you think I’m going to let it pass?’

  ‘Dad, do be quiet!’ Linn said. ‘Get back to your work and leave me to mine.’

  ‘That’s no work for you!’ Jack said. ‘Not after today, it’s not, by God! Where’s the swine hiding hisself? I’d like to have a few words with him!’

  Challoner came out of the barn and stood with his hands in his breeches pockets. His voice rang out across the yard. ‘You asking for me by any chance?’

  ‘I’m glad you know which swine I meant!’

  ‘You must be drunk, Mercybright, if you think you can talk to me like that!’

  ‘What do you think my daughter is, that you get her to empty your stinking slops? Slavery’s been done away with this good long time since! Are you aiming to bring it back?’

  ‘If she doesn’t like it, she knows what to do! She can clear off and leave the job to someone else!’

  ‘She’s going, don’t worry! I’ll see to that!’

  ‘You can take yourself off at the same time! You think because you’re an old man ‒’

  ‘Old man be buggered!’ Jack said. ‘At least I know what age I am! I don’t make a fool of myself trying to get young women half my age to warm my bed for me and then turning nasty ’cos I don’t get my way!’

  ‘Have you finished, Mercybright?’

  ‘I’ll have finished when I get to the end!’

  News of the quarrel had gone round the farm. The harvesters had come from the nearby field and were loitering about the yard. The two cowmen had come from the sheds. Gerald Challoner now appeared and stood with a spanner in his hand, having come from repairing one of the tractors. His handsome round face was darkly flushed. He raised his spanner in a threatening way.

  ‘We’ve heard about enough from you, Mercybright! You can come to the office and get your cards!’

  ‘Lead the way!’ Jack said. ‘I’ve been on this farm for ten years. That’s ten years too long, so let’s not waste time!’ Ten minutes later Jack and Linn and little Robert walked away from the farmhouse. Challoner’s voice followed them.

  ‘I want you out of your cottage by the end of next week! I’ll serve an eviction on you, else! Do you hear me, man?’ Jack made no answer. He merely walked on. He was trying hard to disguise his limp.

  ‘I knew this would happen!’ Linn said. ‘Why, oh why, couldn’t you leave me be?’

  Again Jack said nothing, but walked on. His bearded face was grimly set. His mouth was a single tight-closed line. Robert, walking with one hand in Linn’s, looked up at her anguished tear-stained face. She began to sob uncontrollably.

  ‘I knew it would end like this!’ she said. ‘If only people would leave me alone!’

  Chapter Twelve

  There was more heavy rain again in September. The Derrent burst its banks again and the roads were flooded for days on end. When the waters at last went down, Jesse Izzard with his son Dicky and three of the other carpenters from Cobbs were out working for eighteen hours, repairing the ruined sluice-gates. Then there were more thunderstorms and the Derrent was in flood again. But at least the sluice-gates were working now. The floods could to some extent be controlled.

  ‘Them sluice-gates should hold till domesday now,’ Jesse said to Beth, his wife, ‘with all the good timber we’ve put into them.’

  Jesse was very important these days, now that Great-grumpa Tewke had gone. Although his wife and son had more say than he in how the carpenter’s shop was run, it was nevertheless a great thing for him to go to the sawmill at Capleton Wick and order timber in huge supplies. He had a little notebook for it. He talked of ‘invoices’ and ‘delivery notes’ and ‘credit charges’. His lips were stained blue from sucking the tip of his indelible pencil. ‘All this paper-work!’ he would say. ‘Seems there’s no end to it, don’t it, eh?’ But he enjoyed it all the same.

  ‘Dad’s never happier,’ Dicky said, ‘than when he’s walking to and from with a bit of paper in his hand.’

  There were other things, too, on Jesse’s mind. The little Pikehouse, which he owned, out on the lonely Norton Road, was about to become empty again. Horace Nash was giving it up and going to live with his son at Blagg. Jesse, as landlord, had much to do.

  ‘There’s one or two been after me, to let them have the Pikehouse,’ he said, ‘and I reckon there’ll be more as well.’

  ‘You can only let it to one,’ said Beth, with a glance towards Dicky and Betony.

  ‘That’s what I said to them. My very words! “I can only let it to one,” I said, “and I need time to decide just who.” Betony and Dicky exchanged a smile. Their mother pretended to frown at them, over her spectacles, which were new.

  ‘It’s a great responsibility, being a landlord,’ she said to them. ‘You should treat your father with respect.’

  ‘They don’t seem to realize,’ Jesse said, ‘that that little house will be theirs one day.’

  ‘That’ll be useful,’ Dicky said, ‘when we need a kennel to keep a dog in!’

  Jesse’s face showed that he was hurt.

  ‘I was born at the Pikehouse,’ he said. ‘Your two sisters was born there too. It ent just a matter of bricks and mortar and a bit of thatch. Your mother and me was married from there. We lived there two years of our married life.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad! It was only a joke!’

  Jesse looked at Betony, who was counting money on the kitchen table.

  ‘Do you want me to take you in to the station, blossom?’

  ‘No, I’m getting a lift with Jeremy Rye.’

  Although September was well advanced, the village school had not yet reopened, due in part to the late harvest, in part to the flooding of so many roads. Betony had decided to go away for a week, to see an old school-friend, Nancy Sposs, who now lived in Birmingham.

  She left the house at eleven o’clock. That afternoon, at about three, Jack Mercybright called at Cobbs, having heard that the Pikehouse was falling empty. Jesse, as landlord, saw him alone. He led him into the best room.

  ‘So you’ve come about the Pikehouse, then? The news soon gets round, my word, it does!’

  ‘Is it right that Nash is going?’

  ‘Moving out on Friday next.’

  ‘Then what about it?’ Jack said.

  ‘That needs some repairs doing first,’ Jesse said. ‘I was out there the other day and ‒’

  ‘Never mind that,’ Jack said. ‘I don’t mind doing a bit of repairs. The Pikehouse will just about suit us fine.’

  ‘It’s the landlord’s job to do the repairs.’

  ‘Ah, I know,’ Jack said. ‘I’ve seen ’em scrambling to get it done!’

  ‘You won’t find me neglecting the place. As soon as there’s anything least like wrong ‒’

  ‘Then you’ll let us have it, Friday next?’ />
  ‘Glory be, you’re in a hurry!’ Jesse said. He took out his pipe and began to light up. It was a thing that took some time. ‘How come you’re looking for a house all of a sudden?’

  ‘I’ve lost my job, that’s how,’ Jack said, ‘and that means I’m losing my cottage too.’

  ‘Laws! You as well! Wherever will it end? There’s any event of men out of work, coming to ask me for jobs and that ‒’

  ‘D’you think I don’t know it? I ent blind!’

  ‘The same with the Pikehouse,’ Jesse said. ‘There’s two or three been after me, wanting me to let them have it, and that’s none too easy to decide.’

  ‘It’s easy enough, I should’ve thought. Just a plain yes or no.’

  ‘Then there’s the question of the rent.’

  ‘I can’t pay no rent for a week or two. Not until I’ve found some work.’

  ‘Laws!’ Jesse said. ‘As bad as that? Now Bert Smith was here on Monday night and offered me two shillings a week. That’s sixpence more than the mason paid, and sixpence is sixpence, after all.’

  ‘So you’re letting him have it, is that what you mean?’

  ‘I never said so. Not in so many words.’

  ‘Well, I reckon my need is greater than his, so how about it?’ Jack said.

  ‘That’s what they all say,’ Jesse said. ‘Please one and offend another ‒ that’s how it is when you’re letting a house.’

  ‘Can I bloody well have it or not?’ Jack said. ‘All I want is a straight yes or no.’

  ‘There’s no need to swear,’ Jesse said. ‘It ent so simple as all that. You’ve got to give me time to think ‒’

  Suddenly Jack could stand no more. He swung on his heel and left the house. Jesse followed him as far as the kitchen and stood staring at the outer door, still vibrating on its hinges. Beth came in from the scullery, wiping her hands on her pinafore.