Linden Rise, page 1
Title
Richmal Crompton
LINDEN RISE
Contents
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
LINDEN RISE
Chapter One
A solitary figure was making its way along the winding country lane. It was a short, stocky figure, carrying a baggy umbrella in one hand and a rush hold-all, secured by leather straps, in the other.
Matilda Pound was going out to service for the first time. She was fifteen years old, solidly and somewhat clumsily built, with a smooth, round face on which the features seemed to have been fashioned by a hasty and inexpert hand. Her cheeks were crudely red, her nose shapeless, her mouth too large, her eyes black and bright and staring. Plodding along in the dark sack-like coat that reached her ankles and the uncompromising black straw hat that rested on her ears, she looked from the distance like a mechanical toy.
She had come by horse bus from her home in a neighbouring village, and was now walking from the bus stop to her new “place.” Her trunk had been sent by carrier’s cart, and the hold-all contained her night things and a print dress and apron in case the trunk did not arrive till next morning.
The lane had originally been a path through the wood, and on either side a sea of bracken seemed to be trying to burst its barriers, thrusting tawny-green fronds through the low railings. At one point it spanned a stream that rippled over its bed of pebbles between silver birches and oak saplings, vanishing like a slender shaft of light in the green distance. A keeper’s cottage stood by the roadside, so weathered and mellow that it might have grown up with the wood. A couple of beehives and a yew tree, trimmed to the shape of a bird, almost filled the tiny garden.
Then the wood came to a sudden end, and in its place stretched on one side a field of wheat, changing from gold to deeper gold as the breeze passed over it, and, on the other, a meadow with fresh blades of grass springing up on the lately mown surface. Instead of the railings were hedges, bright with convolvulus, vetch and flowering blackberry.
Tilly noticed none of these things. She had lived in the country ever since she could remember and took fields, woods and hedges as part of the normal background of life. Her eyes were fixed on a point ahead of her where the lane dipped through the trees into a village in the valley. She could see rooftops, a church tower, the long spreading buildings of a farm, the gleam of a river . . . It was the village of Priors Green, and one of the cottages clustered at the foot of the hill must be Linden Rise, her new “place.”
Though her home was in a nearby village, she had never been to Priors Green before, nor had she met her employer, Mrs. Culverton, who had rented Linden Rise for the summer holidays. Her aunt had made all the arrangements through the Vicar’s wife, and Tilly herself had not been consulted. She was to go to Linden Rise for the six weeks of the summer holidays and do the work of the cottage under the direction of Mrs. Horseferry, the cook-housekeeper.
A chiff-chaff’s note throbbed suddenly through the silence, a dog barked from a farm on the hillside and, as if encouraged to join the symphony, the clock in the church tower slowly struck five.
Tilly considered . . . Her aunt had arranged with Mrs. Horseferry that she should be at Linden Rise by half past five, but, so anxious was she for Tilly to make a good impression, she had turned her out of the house soon after four. Perhaps she’d better wait a few minutes, thought Tilly. She had been trained by her aunt in habits of obedience and punctuality. “Half past five’s half past five,” she seemed to hear her aunt saying. “Not five o’clock nor six.”
She went to the stile that led into the meadow and, setting the rush hold-all on the grass by the roadside, sat down, stiffly upright, on the lowest step, her umbrella across her knees, gazing in front of her.
She was curious about the new “place”, but neither elated nor apprehensive. She had always been a docile, biddable child, accepting philosophically the ups and down of life. Her mind went back to the home she had left and she felt a faint stirring of relief at the thought that she would not be returning to it. Even here, through the peace of the countryside, her aunt’s shrill voice seemed to follow her, upbraiding, reproaching, admonishing.
Her mother had died at her birth and her aunt had brought her up in the straight path of “respectability,” grudging the money and trouble the child cost her, exacting penalty for the slightest misdemeanour with a hard and heavy hand. But something sound at the core of Tilly had saved her from bitterness or even resentment. She enjoyed the small precarious pleasures that came her way—games with other children, Sunday School treats, occasional shopping expeditions into Bellminster, the neighbouring town—and endured with good-natured stoicism the rigours of her aunt’s “rearing”.
Sitting there on the stile in the sunshine, she thought of the cottage kitchen—scoured to so forbidding a cleanliness that her aunt’s eye seemed to glare at her from every polished surface—and the little room that opened off from it, used by her uncle as a work-room. He was a shrivelled monkey-like old man, paralysed from the waist down, who spent his days in an invalid chair, muttering to himself, making model ships that his wife took into Bellminster for sale at regular intervals. Tilly was sometimes sent in to the work-room to help him, but he seldom spoke to her, and his rheumy, red-rimmed eyes and fierce, spasmodic mutterings frightened her so much that she was glad to escape to her aunt’s brisk scolding.
And now all that was over. She was grown-up, fifteen years old, and starting out into the world with a trunk full of sensible clothes and a head full of sensible advice.
“Mind your manners and keep a still tongue in your head,’’ her aunt had said. “You’re lucky to get your feet under a gentleman’s table, and, if you don’t suit, don’t come running back to me. I’ve done my duty by you and from now on you can shift for yourself.’’
And that, in Tilly’s eyes, was only right and proper. There was in her a vein of sturdy self-reliance that made her well satisfied to be independent.
She looked down with pride at her new boots of heavy black leather, her thick black woollen stockings and her new coat. Her aunt had kept an account of what they cost and Tilly was to pay her back from her salary of five shillings a week. In her matter-of- fact, unemotional fashion she was feeling pleased with life. It was good to be sitting here in her new outfit, her nightdress and print dress and apron in the hold-all at her feet, her umbrella on, her knee, her “place” waiting for her down in the valley.
After about quarter of an hour she roused herself, picked up her hold-all, grasped her umbrella and began to walk down the road towards the village in the valley. The lane wound behind a clump of trees, then joined a main road at a point where a half- obliterated signpost gave the direction “Priors Green”. She passed a post-office, a general shop, a church and vicarage, separated from each other by a sleepy overgrown churchyard, a village green and a blacksmith’s forge, the furnace looking small and angry through the open door in the sunlight.
“Turn to the left after the forge,” her aunt had said.
Tilly turned to the left into another lane and crossed a humpback bridge beneath which the river flowed drowsily over smooth flat boulders. Beyond the bridge the lane rose sharply, then descended . . . and there at the crest of the little hillock, behind a row of pollarded lime trees, stood Linden Rise—a long, low white-washed cottage with a green painted door and a green latticed porch. Tall narrow windows opened on to a verandah with a sloping green roof that ran the length of the house. Above were smaller windows with rounded tops. A row of potted geraniums on a shelf in the porch struck a bright note of colour. The whole had an air of gaiety and elegance and charm.
Tilly stood for a moment, looking at it, then remembered her aunt’s injunction: “Don’t you dare to go to the front door. It’s Tradesmen’s Entrance for the likes of you.”
There wasn’t a Tradesmen’s Entrance, but the small path, bordered by lavender bushes and snapdragons, took a sharp turn to the right after reaching the porch and disappeared round the side of the house. Tilly hesitated a few moments, then opened the gate and followed it. Behind the house an untidy garden stretched down to an orchard of gnarled apple trees, and beyond it hills with wooded slopes rose sharply to the sky-line.
The back door stood open. Tilly put down her hold-all and knocked. For the first time she was conscious of a slight feeling of apprehension. Her heart began to beat more quickly as she waited.
Suddenly a woman appeared in the open doorway. She was a large woman, with a massive projecting bosom and massive
“Matilda Pound?” she said in a deep majestic voice.
Tilly gave a little bob.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said.
“Come in, child.”
Tilly took up her hold-all and entered the kitchen. It was a pleasant little room, with curtains and table-cloth of blue-and-white check and a row of twinkling pewter pots on the chimney-piece. A fair girl in a dark skirt and frilly blouse sat at the table. She had a small petulant mouth, china blue eyes and tightly frizzed hair.
“I’m Mrs. Horseferry,” said the large woman to Tilly.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Tilly, setting down the hold-all on the floor.
“Do they call you Matilda or Matty?”
“They call me Tilly, ma’am.”
“We’ll call you Tilly, then. Take off your hat.”
Tilly leant her umbrella carefully against the wall and took off her hat. Her black hair was plastered to her head with perspiration.
“And your coat, child.”
Tilly took off her coat, revealing a voluminous skirt of navy blue serge and a blouse of the same material, buttoning tightly up to the neck. A petersham belt defined sketchily a waist that would have been thick even without the unwieldy folds of serge that it enclosed. The fair girl gave a shrill scream of laughter, but Mrs. Horseferry’s sleepy brown eyes rested on the small ungainly figure with approval.
“Not one of the flighty ones, anyway,” she said.
“No, ma’am,” said Tilly, with a touch of complacency in her voice.
She had once heard her aunt say to her uncle: “Thank heaven, the girl’s homely. They’re easier to raise,” and ever since then she had vaguely considered her lack of looks as something that reflected credit on herself.
“This is Emmy,” said Mrs. Horseferry, with wave of her hand towards the girl at the table.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Emmy in a high-pitched, affected voice.
“Emmy’s not part of our staff,” said Mrs. Horseferry. “She’s a housemaid from the family’s London establishment. She’s only come down to bring the family’s plate and linen and help prepare the rooms.”
“And how they’re going to put up with it beats me,” said Emmy, raising her hand to pat her hair. “I may be funny, but it’d drive me melancholy mad in a week. All this so-called nature! What are they going to do all day? That’s what I want to know.”
“They’ll find things,” said Mrs. Horseferry indulgently.
“The Quality always finds things to do. After all, when you come to think of it, they’re trained to idleness same as the likes of us are trained to work. They can always fill their time with odds and ends. It’s born in them.”
“Well, I must say, it’s a mystery to me what they want to come here for,” said Emmy, rearranging the frills of her muslin blouse with a flourish designed to show off a ring set with a large piece of green glass. “Trees and so on are all right in their way, but when you’ve seen a tree you’ve seen it. You don’t want to go on looking at it day after day after day.”
“They always like the country, do the Quality,” said Mrs. Horseferry. “That and climbing mountains and having cold baths and riding to hounds in all weathers.”
“I know,” said Emmy with a sigh. “Born in the lap of luxury and always trying to get out of it, that’s them . . . Well, thank goodness I goes back tomorrow, and then”—with a slow secret smile—“me for me holiday in Margate.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Horseferry wistfully, “there’s something about Margate. I’ve always said so and I always will.” She turned her sleepy eyes to Tilly, who was standing listening with ingenuous, childlike interest. “Have you had your tea, Tilly?”
“No, ma’am.”
“We’ve not had it either,” said Mrs. Horseferry. “It’s taken us all day getting things to rights. Put the kettle on, Emmy. There’s some eggs and tinned salmon in the larder . . . Your trunk has come, Tilly. I’ll take you up to your room.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Tilly.
She took her hat and coat and umbrella in one hand, the hold- all in the other and followed Mrs. Horseferry into the narrow passage-like hall and up the staircase. The round bright boot-button eyes darted about, catching mysterious glimpses through half-open doors . . . a sitting-room with lace curtains and chintz chair covers and a tall standard lamp shaded by frills of pink silk . . . a dining-room with a lace-edged cloth on the table and miniatures on the wall . . . a bedroom with a white crocheted quilt and a chintz-skirted dressing-table . . . then another flight of stairs that was little more than a ladder and that led to two attic rooms immediately beneath the roof.
“This one’s yours,” said Mrs. Horseferry.
Tilly stood looking around her. The ceiling, of bare unpolished rafters, sloped sharply to the floor. The only window was a skylight just above the small iron bedstead. Against the wall a scarred chest of drawers supported a discoloured mirror. Her tin trunk stood at the foot of her bed. There was no change of expression on the round, plain face, but something behind it seemed to glow and sparkle as the bright eyes moved around. At home she had always slept with her aunt, while her uncle slept on a camp-bed in his work-room, and she had never even considered the possibility of having a room of her own.
“A nice room,” commented Mrs. Horseferry a little uncertainly.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Tilly.
Mrs. Horseferry opened a door, revealing another room of larger proportions, with a dormer window overlooking the garden, and a dressing-table and wardrobe of deal. A hip bath, with a large sponge in it, stood on the floor.
“My room,” said Mrs. Horseferry. “Not princely, but serviceable.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Tilly.
“Emmy will sleep with me tonight and go back to London first thing in the morning . . . We share the hip-bath. You must have a bath every Saturday night and carry your water up from the kitchen.”
“Yes, ma’am” said Tilly.
“I’ll leave you to unpack your trunk, then you can come down and we’ll have tea.”
Mrs. Horseferry manoeuvred her gigantic bosom and posterior down the ladder with unexpected agility, and Tilly was left alone. She stood for a moment, gazing round the room, then set to work unpacking her things. She had three of everything—“Two to wash each other and the third to fall back on, as her aunt put it— three heavy calico nightdresses, three heavy calico chemises and pairs of drawers, three petticoats of dark blue twill, three calico bodices, made from the material left over when the nightdresses had been cut out, three print dresses, three aprons, three plain white caps, three pairs of black ribbed woollen stockings.
“No one shall say,” her aunt had said with the familiar note of grievance in her voice, “that I’ve not done my duty by you.”
Tilly herself had made most of the “outfit” under her aunt’s direction. Not a seam or hem or buttonhole that had not been the occasion of harsh upbraiding. The more tricky joints of the bodices had drawn the palm of her aunt’s hand several times down on Tilly’s black head, but Tilly’s head was a hard one and, as dressmaking under her aunt’s direction was the only sort of dressmaking she knew, she took for granted that it was the normal procedure. She tidied her hair, hung her brush and comb-bag by its tape from the handle of the chest of drawers, changed from her boots into a strong pair of house shoes, then descended the ladder, hurrying almost guiltily along the carpeted passages till she reached the now familiar kitchen.
The kettle was boiling on the fire and the table was laid with fresh lettuce, bread-and-butter, tinned salmon, egg-cups and a large slab of cake. Mrs. Horseferry was putting tea into the teapot and Emmy was standing in front of a mirror on the wall, holding out a strand of hair that had escaped her curling-tongs, pushing it up one single hair and tucking it in among the tightly frizzed waves. Tilly stood by her, watching absorbedly.
