All the dear faces (3 page)

She found her voice at last. "Does he mean it, Mother?"

“
Tha' faither never ses owt he don't mean, Annie."

“
But . . . why?
”

Lizzie looked at her daughter, marvelling for the hundredth time on how she and Joshua, despite her own subdued prettiness as a girl, could have between them made a child quite as bright and lovely as Annie. What ancestor had bequeathed to her that look of a thoroughbred, of pedigree that neither the Bowmans of Cocker-mouth nor the Abbotts of Gillthrop had in their line? Tall she was, already half a head above other girls of her age and though she was far from plump the flesh on her was firm and without blemish apart from the endearing scatter
of pale golden freckles across her nose. Lizzie cut her hair regularly since her father said it was unsightly to have it `all over the bloody place' — his words — but it was thick and springing, a mass of corkscrew curls which stood in a cheerful tangle about her well-shaped head. A bright copper, depending on the light, sometimes russet but, when the sun caught it, so vivid it hurt the eye to behold. It fell about her white neck and ears and over her eyes no matter how often Lizzie hacked it off and she knew it would not be long before Joshua ordered her to bind it up in a length of cloth. There was just so much of it, and then there were her eyes. Deep and enormous, bright with intelligence in her pointed face, almost the same colour as her hair sometimes and at others a pale golden brown which could have been yellow. They were set between lashes which were long and thick, brown at their roots and tipped with gold. Her eyebrows were fine and delicate and her skin was the colour of the buttermilk Lizzie produced in her dairy. She was cheerful, good-humoured and willing, as yet unspoiled by her father's oppression. All flame and brilliance and would it be quenched one day when she was wed to some stolid labouring chap which she knew Joshua hoped to get for her in the absence of a son? Mind, she had a stubborn streak in her which Joshua did his best to curb, succeeding so far, for the child was young, but it could become wilful and when it did what would happen to Lizzie Abbott who would be caught in the middle of it? How would she survive
?

The girl had begun to twirl, her skirts clinging to her slender legs, her bare feet stamping on the flagged floor of the kitchen. She was going to school, she exulted, she was going to school. For some reason known only to her father she was to be sent to school. She would learn. She would be able to read and write and be somebody for was not an education the key which opened the door to all the dreams she had ever dreamed? She would be a scholar, as good as them up there at Long Beck where her status in life had given Mrs Macauley the right to hit Annie Abbott's mother as though she was nothing but a dog
.

Though she could not have said why, nor even tried for she was not quite twelve years old, the picture of the tall and haughty figure of Reed Macauley on his fine black mare moved stealthily across her enchanted, simmering mind
.

Chapter
2

Annie Abbott was not quite fifteen years old when she fell ecstatically in love with the handsome young actor in the travelling company which played at the splendid theatre recently built in Keswick. The year was 1843 and the play was The Outlaw of Sicily in which the handsome young actor had the leading role
.

On that day Sally and Mim Mounsey were picking blackberries in the lane which led from Browhead to Upfell where their father farmed.

“
A nice blackberry 'n' apple tart, that's what tha' lad needs ter pick up 'is appetite, " their worried mother had said at breakfast time. "Tha' knows 'ow our Davy do like a blackberry 'n' apple tart an' wi' a dab o' cream from that lot I've just put in t' crock it'll slide down a treat.
”

Davy Mounsey's strange lack of appetite this last day or two had been a source of mystery to his mother and an irritation to his father who could not abide a 'finicky lad' and especially one who said he 'hurt all over' and could not get out of his bed. A bit flushed he was and not his usual self but it was the Tup Fair at the weekend and how was Jem to get his lambs to Keswick and the tup he meant to hire, back again without the help of his son, he beseeched his wife to tell him?

“
'E'll be right as rain by then, you'll see," she answered stoutly, more to reassure herself than Jem. "I'm mekkin' 'im up an infusion of angelica. Sally gathered me some from t' woods, didn't tha' lass, an' wi' a cupful o' that inside 'im 'e'll soon pick up. A rare good tonic is angelica an' it settles the stomach. 'E'll soon 'ave 'is appetite back. 'E needs a bit o' summat tasty inside 'im . .
“

Aggie Mounsey's cure for all ills was a `bit o' summat tasty' and a good swig of one of her herbal remedies. "That blackberry 'n' apple tart'll do the trick, you just wait an' see if it don't," she added hopefully
.

Sally and Mim, quarrelling half-heartedly as they always did, more from habit than ill-feeling, had reached the gate to Browhead having picked indolently for the whole of the October morning at a speed which would have incensed Joshua Abbott. Both big girls, Sally the same age as Annie, Mim a year younger, but in his opinion allowed to do as they liked by the indulgent Jem. As long as they helped their mother when she needed it in the dairy or the kitchen, or in any task she set them such as the blackberry picking, their father didn't concern himself overmuch with how they did it or how long it took providing it suited his Aggie. Good-natured, the lot of them, feckless Joshua would have said, but Upfell farm thrived where Browhead did not so how to explain it? He could not, unless it was his own lack of a son. He did not consider the almost inhuman amount of work his own daughter did each day worth mentioning
.

She was trudging up the lane from Hause drawing the sledge which Joshua had made behind her, the harness about her shoulders, the leather straps cutting into her flesh and thrusting forward the young swell of her breasts. She leaned into it, her clogged feet feeling the track for purchase since the load on the sledge was heavy. Her face was dewed with sweat and it soaked the armpits of her shabby grey bodice. Her hair was tied up in a length of cloth, allowed to grow now that it was covered, drawn back severely from her pinched face and braided about her head which the cloth covered. On the sledge were two enormous sacks of milled grain which she had just collected from the miller in Hause
.

She stopped when she saw Mim and Sally, her breath scraping from her lungs in great heaving gasps, and drawing off the harness she threw herself down on the grass verge, wiping her face with the sleeve of her bodice.

“
Watch out fer me faither, Sal, will tha'? I'll 'ave to 'ave a breather. Them straps are cuttin' inter me summat cruel. Look . . ." She pushed down the neck of her bodice and on her white flesh were two bright red weals from her shoulders to under her armpits and both sisters drew back in horror.

“
Eeh Annie, them's nasty. Can tha' faither not fetch grain 'imself. That there load's too 'eavy fer a lass."

“
Try telli' 'im that, Sally. 'Tha's a big girl now, our Annie,' 'e ses ter me, besides, 'e's up rakin' fells for t' sheep an' 'asn't time. Me mother offered ter come wi' me but yer know 'ow it is wi' 'er.
”

Oh, aye, they all knew how it was with Lizzie Abbott, poor soul. Sad, oppressed Lizzie Abbott who, with her daughter, led the most miserable of lives. A life on the level of an animal, their mother said indignantly though there was nothing she could do about it. And like an animal Lizzie bred every year, or had done until three years ago when her overworked body had given up the struggle and simply refused to conceive again. She had strained at every task her husband put her to, overburdened and doing her best to protect her child, taking jobs from her which were beyond the child's strength but now it was the other way around as Annie grew tall, taller than Lizzie and though slender to the point of leanness, strong
.

They chatted for a while, the three girls, sitting on the sun-warmed grass verge, idly eating the blackberries Sally and Mim had picked. The sweat dried on Annie's face but it was very noticeable that she was not relaxed, that her head constantly swivelled from side to side, her eyes on the look-out for her father who could, though he never hit her, reduce her to trembling, rebellious fear, calling her a lazy young varmint, his words cold, his jibing voice filled with his contempt, his hard nature venting his spite on her for his lack of a son. She who was a mere girl. She knew he was up on the fell but the habit of a lifetime was so strong in her she could not throw it off but must have eyes in the back of her head on guard for his silent approach.

“
We're goin' ter Keswick, me an' Mim, ter see the players. I don't suppose there's any chance tha' can come wi' us?" Sally put a good-hearted hand on Annie's bare brown arm just where it disappeared into her sleeve. The difference, as the sleeve rose a little at Sally's touch, in the skin which had been exposed to the sun and that which had been covered, was startling. A deep honey colour suddenly becoming a pure, alabaster white. Her face was the same, and her throat, but where the open neck of her bodice began it became an almost translucent white. She worked in the open fields or on the fells for much of the day, every day, when she wasn't at school and the constant exposure to sun and wind, to the wild elements which more often than not prevailed in the Lakeland district was, as she remarked mournfully to her mother —for who wanted to look like an old man when you were going on fifteen — making her as weather
beaten as her father
.

Annie laughed shortly. "Don't be daft, Sal. How can I get away from t' farm? Faither knows where I am every minute o' t' day an' night. Besides, even if I could get away, which I can't, where would I get money fer such a thing?"

“
It's only threepence ter stand at back, Annie." "Maybe, but it might as well be three guineas 'cos I 'aven't got it."

“
What about tha' mother? 'Asn't she got a bit put by?" as her mother had, for the egg and butter money was traditionally the perquisite of the farmwife since she did the work.

“
Don't be daft, Sal," Annie said again, but less caustically, with less certainty. There was nothing in the world she would love more than to go to the playhouse with Sally and Mim. To be as carefree, as free as they were allowed to be, even if it was only for a few hours. She went nowhere that was not connected with the farm except for the year in which she had been allowed to go to school in the village. She had been twelve then and had known nothing, but in those twelve months she had absorbed
more than Sally and Mim had learned in three years. She could read and write and add up and do 'take-aways'. She had learned a smattering of history and geography, for the teacher, finding Annie wanted to learn and was not just passing the time as Sally and Mim and most of her other pupils were doing, had shown an interest in her and had even lent her her own precious books. Sense and Sensibility by Miss Jane Austen and Mr Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers. These had given Annie a taste, not, alas, fulfilled, to read more, to see more, to know more and how was she to do that, labouring round her father's farm until she was married when, she presumed, she would do the same round her husband's. William Shakespeare was a great writer of plays, so her teacher at the Dame school had told her and perhaps it might be one of his that was to be shown in Keswick.

“
What's on?" she asked abruptly.

“
On where?" Mim answered, popping another blackberry in her mouth.

“
What play is it?"

“
'Tis called The Outlaw of Sicily."

“
Did a chap by the name of William Shakespeare write it?"

“
Nay, don't ask me. Who is 'e, anyway?" Mim was clearly unimpressed, and anyway, did it matter? "He's a great play writer."

“
Well, I don't know if 'e wrote this 'un, but it says on the playbill that there's to be dancin' betwixt each part."

“
Dancin' . . ." Oh, how she loved to dance. Not that she'd done much but at the last 'boon clip' she had twirled in the 'Cumberland Square Eight' with Davy Mounsey, to the music of Dobby Hawkins' fiddle and to her astonishment her father had allowed it. The speculative gleam in his eye had gone unnoticed by her as she stamped her foot and threw back her growing hair, again, amazingly, allowed to hang free, though Lizzie Abbott saw it and so did Aggie Mounsey, both aware of its significance.

“
What time you goin'?"

“
Mid mornin'. Faither'll give us a lift to Keswick but we've to walk back."

“
Threepence, you say?"

“
Aye." Sally clasped Annie's hand, gazing earnestly into her face, seeing for perhaps the first time what no one had perceived before. Annie had always been scrawny, with her collar-bones looking as though they were about to break out from beneath her delicate white skin. She had thin, square shoulders, an extreme boyish slenderness, brittle and fine-textured, all hollows and angles with a pointed face in which her eyebrows flew rejoicingly up or ruefully down depending on the mood of her father. She had the rich, woodland colouring of a fox, her eyes just as golden and hunted but now, with her expression one of growing excitement, she seemed to light up, come alive, to crackle with anticipation and she was quite incredibly lovely.

“
Will tha' come then?" Sally felt her own excitement begin to snap.

“
If me mother'll give me threepence. That's if she 'as it, an' that's if Faither's up on t' fell again an' if 'e's to be there all day, an' if . . .
”

It seemed Lizzie did have threepence to give her daughter and more besides which of course no one knew about, saved painfully over the years, a farthing here, a farthing there, stolen, Lizzie supposed it was, whenever she could do so undetected, from the egg money, the butter money, money that passed through her hands in the transactions over besoms and swills, most handed over faithfully to Joshua except for what was hidden behind a certain loose stone in the cow shed
.

She had been aghast and yet, looking into her daughter's pleading face, a face suddenly lovely and bright with hope, she could not find it in her heart to refuse since the child had nothing in her life but hard work from cock-crow to nightsong. Giving in to the only impulse she had ever known since the one she had succumbed to when she had accepted and married Joshua, she pressed the threepence into her daughter's hand, kissed her cheek and told her
to be back before her father returned from Middle Fell. Her face worked painfully as she watched the light, dancing feet of her child, almost fifteen, run down the track towards the farm gate where Jem Mounsey and his girls waited for her. She had on the dress Lizzie herself had been married in, carefully stored in lavender in the press in the bedroom, a light shade of tawny brown which, on Annie, as it had not done on Lizzie, looked exactly right. It was too short and a mite too tight across the breasts, causing a pang of misgiving in Lizzie for, with her glorious hair brushed until it stood out from her head and down her back in a brilliant copper cloud, Annie was enough to catch the eye of any man which worried Lizzie even more. But how could she resist that pleading face, those vivid eyes which, after all, were asking for very little? So innocent. A ride into Keswick with a perfectly respectable family to see the players which evidently Jem and Aggie Mounsey thought fitting for their girls to see
.

As Annie turned to wave rapturously, Lizzie's eyes looked up towards Middle Fell and she prayed lustily that Joshua would remain there until nightfall
.

They stood at the back of the playhouse, Annie and Sally and Mim, their young minds enchanted, their young eyes bright with the joy of it, for they were no more than children and did not see the tawdry costumes, the artificial deportment and speech of the actors, the triviality of the story. They were transported into fairyland, the land of myth and legend and imagination, and with the rest of the unsophisticated audience they cheered and howled, wept and laughed, loving every minute of it. In the first interval between parts, when Annie felt a tap on her arm, she did not at first recognise the young man beneath the appalling stage make-up as the leading male player she had just seen on the stage. He was quite alarming close to with his drawn-on black moustache, his gypsy ear-rings, his boots and his cutlass and for a moment all three girls shrank back.