The Dwelling Place, page 33
She looked at his grey, grave face. It didn’t look young anymore. She said, ‘He…he wasn’t happy; he was fretting as I knew he would. And…and what’s more’—she made a slow, sad movement with her head—‘he never took to me. He even had a dislike for me.’
‘Oh no! No!’ He moved an inch or two towards her and bent his head forward. ‘You’re imagining things; he could never dislike you.’ He did not add, ‘No-one could dislike you…except, except Isabelle.’
‘He did. It was…it was hard to stomach but he did, until this very mornin’, when he knew I was bringing…bringing him home.’ She stared into the deep grey eyes that were holding hers and some part of her was surprised that she was talking to him in an ordinary way, as she would to Matthew, not waiting for the right words to come to her, but just saying what was in her mind. She said now, ‘You’ll let him stay here, you won’t send him any place else will you?’ And he asked quietly, ‘Where else could I send him?’
She began to cough again, and he screwed up his face at the harshness of it and said, ‘You have a cold,’ and at that moment there was a tap on the door. It opened and Hatton came in, followed by the second footman bearing a tray. Hatton now placed a small table to the side of the couch and, putting the tray on it, said, as if speaking to a member of the household, ‘I hope you find all you need…Miss.’ And she looked at him and said, ‘Thank you.’
When the servants had gone and she had made no attempt to drink the soup, or eat the hot rolls and odd-shaped pieces on the plate that looked like chicken, he bent over and pulled the table further towards her and said gently, ‘Drink the soup,’ and handed her the bowl and the spoon, and she found herself drinking it gratefully.
She had an odd feeling about her as if she weren’t really here and didn’t care where she was, and the feeling was growing every minute. She did not stand any longer in awe of the servants or His Lordship, and certainly not of him sitting there. She was halfway through the soup when she remembered about the papers. They had fallen from her lap onto the couch, and she picked them up and handed them to him, saying, ‘I…I won’t need these now.’
‘That’s nonsense.’ His voice was sharp. ‘You’ll need them as much as before; you can’t possibly stay in that place any longer. You must accept them.’
She shook her head as she gulped a spoonful of soup, ‘No, no; I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be right. Anyway, I just couldn’t. An’…’ she turned towards him and there was a deep sad softness in her face now as she added, ‘I’d be out of me element. I wouldn’t know what to do, or how to go on. And what’s more I’d be among strangers.’
He was about to reply, ‘You’ll never be short of friends when you’ve got money,’ but he resisted and said firmly, ‘They’re yours, the house and the money have both been made over to you.’
‘No, no.’ She was again shaking her head. ‘Your father is goin’ to do what he did afore, an’ that’ll be enough. I want nothin’ more, just enough to keep the bairns—the children—warm inside and out until they’re able to fend for themselves.’ She took another spoonful of soup, then finished conversationally in a slow quiet tone, ‘It won’t be long now. Nellie’s going on six, Sarah’s ten. She should be out in place, but she’s not strong, Sarah.’
He stared at her. She was talking as she had never talked to him, and she was more beautiful in this moment than he had ever seen her. Her face was flushed with the chill she had, he supposed; her lips were moist and tempting, her eyes were deep and warm; even the scar on her cheek was like a large beauty spot. God, he mustn’t think about the scar, or the cause of it. It was over, finished! He had escaped. Thanks to the miller. Where would he be now but for the miller? And the miller loved her. He was a married man and he loved her. Why hadn’t he married her? There must have been a reason. Perhaps he hadn’t known her long. But there was one thing certain: he knew her now and wanted her. There were all kinds and shades of wanting, there were all kinds and shades of love. Why had this girl been brought into the pattern of his life? Or, at least, if she’d had to come, why couldn’t she have come as one of his own class? But what was his class now? He had fallen between two stools, and today he was climbing back onto the lesser of them, from where he’d rise, he supposed, to the glorified position of captain some day. As a captain of a ship he could have married her; as first mate he could have married her; but as captain or first mate he was still, underneath the skin, Clive John James Horatio Fischel, and heavily conscious that one day he’d bear the title of lord.
He now asked softly under his breath, ‘How is the miller?’ and she answered, ‘He was well when I last saw him.’
‘I’ll…I’ll never be able to repay him. Will you tell him that?’ She made no answer to this and he went on, ‘Nor to forgive myself for all the wrong I have done you.’ His head was bowed deep, and she looked at it. His hair was very fair, almost silver. She had the crazy desire to put her hand out and stroke it. What was wrong with her? Was she forgetting what this man had once done to her? Yes, perhaps; anyway it wasn’t good to go on harbouring animosity. She said softly and very, very gently, ‘You mustn’t blame yourself any more. You know, I was thinkin’ in the night about something that me da said.’ There she was going again, talking ordinary-like to him. What was the matter with her? But she couldn’t stop herself, and so she went on, ‘He used to say, “Time is to the mind as goose fat to a rough chest,” and so about this time next year things’ll look different. And I was thinkin’ an’ all that it wasn’t really you who started all this, it was our Jimmy. You see…’ She now leaned her head against the back of the couch because she felt it was about to wobble. She was feeling slightly dizzy, but she continued, ‘It started with him showing Joe how to set a trap for a rabbit. And yet I can’t blame Jimmy, because we’d have been hard put many a time for a bite if it hadn’t have been for Jimmy and his trap. No, I kept thinkin’ in the night, although it seemed to start with Jimmy yet there was another cause for it. And it wasn’t me ma and da dying either, because we had been hungry when they were alive, yet somehow it was being hungry.’ She turned her head and looked at him. ‘Yes, it was being hungry, I think, that started it in the first place. If people had enough to eat and could keep warm I don’t think things would happen, do you?’
‘Oh, my dear!’ He moved his head in wide sweeps as she finished, ‘So what I mean is, you’re not to blame yourself, ’cos you know…’ She brought her body up straight on the couch, but she bowed her head deeply forward towards him as she ended finally, ‘I’m…I’m not sorry I had the bairn.’
When he lifted himself towards her and grabbed her hands he startled her, but she left them in his. Their faces were but inches apart, and now, as he slowly raised her hands to his mouth, her heart pounded and the noise was loud in her ears as if she were standing near the river when it was in spate. His lips were pressed against her red rough knuckles. They were warm, hot, and when they moved over her fingertips she felt it was too much to bear and she gasped and turned her head away on to her shoulder as her body stiffened against her wild, mad thoughts. She felt her hands returned to her lap. Then he was standing up; and when he spoke she dropped her head back on to her shoulders and stared at him.
‘Goodbye, Cecilia. Think of me kindly, will you?’ His face floated mistily before her gaze. She moved her head twice; then in answer she said one word. She didn’t know whether she spoke it aloud or not, but what she said was, ‘Always.’
She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them he was no longer there. When she heard the door close she turned her head in its direction; he was gone.
She brought her head round again and once more she leaned it against the head of the couch and stared towards the great blazing fire, and she knew he needn’t have gone. If she had been scheming enough, or clever enough, she could have kept him and he would have been glad to stay. Yes, she knew that; right deep within her she knew that he would have been glad to stay, and with her, an ignorant girl, who could only just write her name.
She didn’t hear His Lordship enter the room; she didn’t know he was standing to the side of her until he spoke, and when he asked, ‘You drank your soup?’ she pulled herself to the edge of the couch, saying, ‘Yes, thank you, sir.’ And now she rose, and she knew that if she didn’t take a pull at herself she’d pass out, as she had done once before, right at his feet. And it mustn’t happen a second time, for they would say she was just doing it. Yes, they would say that. ‘I’ll…I’ll be going now. sir,’ she said.
‘Very well.’
She walked slowly down the room, he by her side, and before they reached the door he stopped and said, ‘May I say again how very grateful I am to you? I shall always be in your debt. Cunnings will call upon you soon and tell you of my arrangements for you.’
She said nothing to this, yet she wanted to talk, jabber. It was a strange feeling.
His Lordship accompanied her across the hall. He made a sign to Hatton who called to the coachman. Then, within Hatton’s hearing and, as the butler said later he could hardly believe his ears, His Lordship bowed towards her and said, ‘If you would care to call at any time I shall be pleased to see you.’ He had not said ‘If you would care to come and see the child,’ but that was what he meant. Again she told herself to keep silent. She now inclined her head towards him, then walked from him and down the steps to where Bowmer was waiting to help her into the carriage.
Fifteen minutes later Bowmer helped her out of the carriage and then found he had to help her up the slope; and when they entered the house he put her on a chair, and she said to him, in an odd voice, ‘Thanks; I’ll be all right now.’ Looking at her face he didn’t think she would be, but that wasn’t his business and so he took his leave.
Twelve
There was a blizzard raging when Matthew made his way by road, it being the safest, to the dwelling; and when Charlotte opened the door to him he saw that her face was red with crying. He was kicking the snow from his boots and leggings as he asked quickly, ‘What is it?’
‘It’s our Cissie; she’s bad.’
Inside the room he looked to where Cissie was lying on the straw tick before the fire, with Sarah kneeling beside her. When he reached them Sarah looked up at him dumbly, fear in her eyes, and he gazed down at Cissie.
Her breath was coming in short, hard gasps, pushing the padded quilt up and down as if it were worked by a pump handle.
He said quickly, ‘How long has she been like this?’
‘Since yesterday, since she come back after takin’ Richard to the Hall.’
‘She took him back?’
‘Aye. An’ she’s been bad since. It got worse last night an’…an’ she told us to keep her warm. She brought the tick in here.’ She tapped the bed. ‘She keeps talking and yellin’ and she won’t let’s touch her hands. We’ve washed her face but she won’t let us touch her hands.’
He looked at Cissie’s hands, tight against her breast, the fingers of one hand tucked into the other.
She turned her head now and looked up at him with a blank gaze and croaked, ‘The scarf was round her neck, round the hole. ’Twas all red, just the ends white, just the ends.’
‘She keeps on like that,’ said Sarah; ‘she keeps on about a scarf. And she was sittin’ up in the night and yellin’ about a woman with a gun. She’s gone wrong in the head.’
He turned and looked at Sarah in silence until Cissie began to ramble again, her head tossing now as she mumbled, ‘She was as long as the door and her feet stuck out from under the cloak. Matthew…Matthew…he put his cloak over her, an’ Clive…Clive…Clive…’ Her voice trailed away. Then she pushed herself up on her elbow and began to cough, and Sarah held her and when she lay back she caught hold of her sister’s hand and said between gasps, ‘He sat on the wood block, just like her, like dead, an’…an’ he had the same look in his eyes, when…when…’ Her voice again trailed away.
Sarah said now, ‘We should get somebody, a woman from the hamlet.’ And he asked, ‘What?’ then exclaimed harshly, ‘No! No!’ That was the last thing they wanted in here, a woman who, listening to her ravings, would soon put two and two together, and then where would they all be?
‘Is it the fever, Matthew?’ Sarah now whispered, and he said. ‘No, not the typhoid. I think it’s a sort of pneumonia.’
‘Will she die?’
‘No! No!’ Her question brought him up on to his feet, and he said briskly as he took his coat off, ‘Get some boiling water going. And you’—he turned to Charlotte and Annie—‘stop your snivelling now and bring me some covers, top bedding. Go on.’
He rolled up his sleeves, saying to Sarah, ‘We’ll make a sort of tent an’ fill it with the steam from the kettle…Put a bit of sacking round the bottom to save the soot falling off it. And get Charlotte to keep the kail pot boiling.’
‘Clive…Clive.’
He looked down on her. She was thrashing the cover with her joined hands as she gasped out the name, and his face hardened for a moment as he thought, She must think of him as that. But what odds. What odds now, for if she wasn’t seen to and quick she wouldn’t be able to think anything, she would die. His father had gone like this, not through his broken back but just with…the chill.
It snowed all day and it lay thick, and when darkness came and a keen north-east wind started to blow, it gathered into deep drifts which piled against the dwelling and muffled all sound like a great feather tick.
The heat in the room was almost unbearable. Matthew felt he was sitting in a steam bath; he was wearing only his shirt and breeches and they were both sticking to his skin. Except for the time he had galloped back to the mill he had been on his knees most of the day and under a tent-like structure held by the girls, while he supported the steaming kettle. Twice he’d had to lift her while the girls had pulled the sweat-soaked coarse sheet from underneath her and put a dry one in its place. And he had seen her body for the first time when he had rubbed it with warm towels, and he had groaned inwardly the while. Now it was close on nine o’clock and there was a long night to face, and she seemed to be getting worse with every minute of it.
Nellie and Annie were in bed in the cave. Sarah, worn out, was sleeping huddled up on a blanket between the foot of the mattress and the cave wall, and Charlotte was making a brave effort to keep awake and to hand Matthew the things he needed.
There were two candles burning on the mantelpiece and a lantern stood in the middle of the table. Although the room held sounds of Cissie’s agonised breathing, the wood crackling in the fire, and the water bubbling in the big black kail pot on the low hob, the place was strangely quiet.
He himself felt very tired—sapped, in fact. There was a cramp in his leg and he was in the act of pulling himself to his feet when Charlotte let out a smothered scream and he swung round to see her with her hands across her mouth staring at the little window. His eyes flicking to it, he saw, above the banked snow on the rough ledge of stone that supported the frame, a face. One second it was there, the next it had gone. Although the impression had been as fleeting as lightning he had recognised the eyes in that face.
As he rushed across the room he grabbed his coat from the chest and the lantern from the table. The next minute he was outside pulling the door closed behind him. Stretching his arm to its fullest extent he swung the lantern high and in its arch he saw the dark, bulky figure stumbling away in the snow. He ran down the path the children had cut earlier in the drift leading to the wood house, and when he reached the end of the wall he floundered into deep snow and shouted above the wind, ‘I hope you’re satisfied.’ Then he stood for a moment before turning about and going into the house again.
When he had gone home earlier in the day he had said to her frankly, ‘I’ll be out all night.’ She had been putting some material on the table and had a pair of scissors in her hand. She had pulled her fingers from the handles and gripped them like a man does a dagger before plunging it forward, and he had answered her ferocious look by saying, ‘If it was for that I could have stayed out nights years ago; I’m goin’ because she’s ill, very ill. It’s pneumonia an’ there’s only the bairns there.’
He had watched her gulping on her spittle before she growled out, ‘It’s usual to get a woman to nurse another; she’s near the hamlet.’ And to this he answered, ‘Aye, she is; but you and your like have made it impossible for her to go near the hamlet for years. Anyway, few will risk their necks over that land in weather like this.’
‘But you will…You will.’
‘Aye, I will.’ He nodded at her, and on this she stabbed the scissors point down into the wooden table. Then she said under her breath, ‘I’ll bring Parson Bainbridge to you and I’ll get him to hold you up from the pulpit. He’s done it afore to bring folks like you to heel.’
His face darkened at this and he said slowly, ‘You bring Parson Bainbridge here or go to him and, I’m telling you, I’ll prove your words right. Just think on that. You bring him here an’ I’ll not only take her but every bitch I can get me hands on. And I’ll pay them well. Aye, by God, I’ll pay them well. I’ll see the miller’s money is put to some good. Now you think on it.’ And with that he had left her…
Back in the room, Charlotte said, ‘Who was it?’ and he answered, ‘Likely somebody lost their way.’ She stared at him, not believing him, but said nothing more, until Cissie began rambling again, croaking out words, ‘Soup. Soup.’ Turning from her knees she said, ‘She keeps on about soup but she can’t drink any. And she’s at that again, pushing the back of her hand across my mouth.’
‘Get by,’ he said, and taking Charlotte’s place he began to wipe the running sweat from Cissie’s face and neck.
Her breathing now was becoming even more difficult. She tossed from side to side and moaned and croaked out the child’s name. ‘Richard. Richard.’
