Inherit the Skies (10 page)

‘I'll take you, Sarah. Only let Dr Haley go on ahead a little. I don't want to overtake him in the lanes or that pony of his may take fright and they will end up in Bristol.'

When he had given the doctor time to get well ahead Gilbert drove slowly back to the road and turned in the direction of Starvault Cottages. Sarah did not think to wonder how he knew where she lived; it was only later that the thought occurred to her and even then she satisfied herself with the answer: a man like Gilbert Morse knows everything.

As the cottages came into sight she could see Dr Haley's pony quietly grazing the grass verge outside. Then as Gilbert Morse pulled the motor into the widest part of the lane she was amazed to see the door open and Dr Haley come out, tossing his bag into the trap. Her heart lifted with a great surge of joy. Mum must be better. The doctor was no longer needed.

Gilbert moved the motor across to the entrance to Starvault Cottages gently, so as not to startle the pony.

‘Well?' His tone was brusque.

Dr Haley spread his hands and the expression on his face turned Sarah's joy to cold clammy fear. It spread through her veins and everywhere it touched was left weak and trembling. The dread debilitated her; she could not move a muscle.

‘Well?' Gilbert said again.

Haley shook his head.

‘Too late,' he said carelessly. ‘She's gone.'

The Chewton Leigh estate, which had been in the hands of generations of the Morse family since the dissolution of the monasteries, encompassed twelve hundred acres of rolling Somerset countryside between Bristol and the Mendip Hills. Bordered on three sides by Duchy land, the estate took in two copses and a small wooded lake, part of the village of Chewton Leigh and enough prime farm land to support five small farms. Four of these were let on long leases to tenant farmers, the fifth – Home Farm – was an acknowledged extension of the ‘Big House'. When Gilbert's grandfather, old Robert Morse, had been Squire he had run it himself with the help of an agent and an army of labourers, somehow succeeding in making the necessary decisions and issuing his instructions in spite of riding to the hounds two and sometimes three times a week during the hunting season. His son, John, had shown little interest in the land, however, and less in hunting, shooting, and other ‘gentlemanly pursuits'. His passion had been for the steam engines which as a child he had watched puffing down the newly constructed line in the next valley and when he had been the beneficiary of an unexpected legacy from a supposedly penniless grandfather on his mother's side, freedom had beckoned. John had stopped only to say a brief prayer at the Parish Church for the soul of the old man who had chosen to live in virtual poverty and decided for reasons best known to himself to leave every penny of his secret fortune to his favourite grandson, before riding into Bristol to join forces with two impecunious but equally besotted friends and set about actually producing some of the steam engines which so absorbed him.

Miraculously the venture had been successful – more than successful. Whether enthusiasm and backing alone had carried the day or whether John had in fact been a much shrewder businessman than his family had ever suspected was a much debated point; whichever, the factory flourished and Morse Engines was soon a thriving concern, employing upwards of fifty men at the now enlarged works site.

At the age of sixty Robert had met his death riding his usual headlong charge at a dangerous hedge in the hunting field and John had decided to install a manager to take over the running of Home Farm. This pattern had been allowed to continue for Gilbert, his only son, was no more inclined to interest himself in farming than his father had been. His heart too was in engineering though he dabbled in the City to satisfy his mother, who looked on the thriving little business empire as a rather grubby venture almost akin to ‘trade' in its undesirability, and though after John's death he kept a paternal eye on the estate, Home Farm was left in the hands of the manager.

Amos Pugh had occupied this position now for almost twenty years and his solid expertise had ensured those three hundred acres were the most profitable and best run in the valley.

He was a countryman through and through, a reserved and softly spoken man with mild brown eyes not unlike those of the lumbering Friesian cows which grazed the pastures around Chewton Leigh House and a skin weathered to a leather tan by constant exposure to winter wind and summer sun alike. Amos rose before dawn and went to bed with the sun and if he had a single ambition beyond running the Morse farm to the best of his not inconsiderable abiltity then no-one in the valley ever got to know about it.

His wife however was a very different kettle of fish. Bertha Pugh was a shrew, so local opinion ran, and how a decent man like Amos had come to fall into her clutches they could not imagine.

Bertha was a large woman with a bustling manner. Her hair, scraped into a loose bun, frequently escaped to hang in bushy tendrils around her rather stodgy face and she had big capable hands and enormous feet which she shod in the kind of sensible boots which coped easily with farmyard mud. Here however the resemblance to the archetypal farmer's wife ended. Bertha's eyes were small and mean and made smaller and meaner by the folds of flesh which surrounded them and her voice was shrill and complaining, when she was not adopting the hectoring tone she so often used to her long-suffering husband.

Amos Pugh might be the most efficient farm manager on the estate; privately Bertha considered him a fool – and she treated him as such most of the time. He must be a fool, she reasoned, or he would own, or at least rent, his own farm instead of merely remaining an employee of the Morses. When she had married him, fifteen years earlier, he had already been installed as Gilbert's farm manager, but she had been sure he was destined for greater things and had believed that with her to push and encourage he would achieve what she felt was her right – a farm of their own which would be the envy of the neighbourhood. But no amount of bullying and nagging had been able to bring her one single step closer to her objective. Amos was perfectly happy as he was – and Amos with his mind set against something was as immovable as the craggy rocks of Cheddar Gorge some fifteen miles away to the south.

Nor was Amos's stubborn resistance to self-improvement his only failure in his wife's eyes. Fifteen years of marriage had failed to provide her with the family she felt would give her status in the present and insurance for the future. Never once did it occur to Bertha that their childlessness might possibly be her own fault. She blamed Amos fairly and squarely for her inability to conceive. Added to his total lack of ambition it seemed to her he had turned out to be a poor specimen of a husband and her frustration feasted upon itself and grew until it came close to being an obsession.

‘Why ever I married you I don't know!' she would say to Amos whenever some action or omission irritated her into giving vent to the barely controlled fury which simmered inside her large ungainly body. ‘ You're the most useless man I ever met!' And Amos would fix her with those patient brown eyes, shake his head and find some job about the farm that demanded his urgent attention so that there were only the hens who strutted placidly around the farmyard and wandered into the kitchen when the door was left open to the summer sun to hear her.

That warm evening in late June however there was no escape for Amos though, with the hay almost ready to be cut in the long meadows beneath Home Farm, there were a hundred and one things he could think of that still needed doing. He stood at the window of the big flagged kitchen looking out at the sky that was deepening from blue to violet above the tall elms and listening to his wife's voice reaching scratchy fever pitch.

‘
Why
, Amos? Why did you tell Gilbert Morse we'd have that Thomas child here?' she demanded and the fact that she had already asked the question half a dozen times since he had come in from the fields in no way detracted from the ferocity of the attack. ‘What ever were you thinking of?'

‘I didn't have no choice, Bertha,' Amos replied solidly. ‘ Mr Morse come to see me when I were working over in Top Meadow and he put it to me straight. The poor little soul's mother is dead an' she's got nowhere to go an' that's an end of it.'

‘But why should he think we'd have her here?'

‘Well, we've got plenty of room, I s'pose,' Amos reasoned. ‘ T'ain't as if we got nippers of our own, be it?'

The reminder only added to Bertha's annoyance.

‘What's that got to do with it? She's nothing to us. Just because we haven't got family of our own that don't mean we've got to take in every waif and stray for miles around.'

‘Not every one, Bertha. Just young Sarah.'

‘I think it's a nerve to even suggest such a thing! And what's it to do with him anyway?'

‘You know her mother worked for Mrs Morse – and Mrs Rose Morse before her. The Morses always look after them as work for 'em.'

The idea of patronage added fuel to Bertha's fire. Her ruddy countrywoman's complexion deepened to a blotchy unattractive puce and her heavy jowls quivered with indignation.

‘If he's so bloomin' concerned, why can't he have her up there with them at the Big House?'

Amos half turned to look at her, his mild eyes expressing amazement that she should even think of such a thing.

‘Up at the Big House o' the gentry? Oh, talk sense, Bertha, do!'

‘And what's so daft about it I'd like to know?' She skirted the table, angrily banging the pickle jar which she had been too preoccupied to clear away after supper. ‘I suppose Mrs High and Mighty Blanche Morse wouldn't want a common ragamuffin whose mother was no better than she should be. But I'm expected to take her in under my roof.'

Amos ran a hand through his thinning thatch of hair so that it stood on end like badly baled straw.

‘It ain't like that, Bertha, and you know it. It wouldn't be fitting. Anyway, like I said, we got plenty of room. And I didn't think you'd take on like this. I thought you'd be … well, quite tickled to have a girl about the place to help you. You're always on about how much you've got to do and not having any nippers of your own an' that …'

For Amos it was a lengthy speech. He lapsed into silence as if surprised by his own verbosity.

‘An' what good will a girl like that be to me I'd like to know?' Bertha demanded. ‘I don't s'pose she knows the first thing about hard work! And what if she turns out like her mother? That would be a pretty kettle of fish!'

‘Her mother was a nice enough woman.'

‘Nice?
Nice
? Oh, she was nice to somebody, right enough.'

‘Her husband died in India, didn't he?'

‘So
she
said. Did anybody ever set eyes on him? No, they did not. She comes here to a respectable place with a baby and no husband, putting on her airs and graces and then … What did she die of, eh? That's something I'd like to know!' she added darkly.

The implication had the effect of sending Amos back into his shell. If there was one thing he disliked more than Bertha's constant nagging it was gossip and aspersions cast without foundation on the character of those against whom he held no grudge for Amos liked to think only the best of his fellow human beings. Perhaps it was this inherent good nature which had enabled him to endure Bertha's tantrums for fifteen years without ever turning on her and telling her to stop her clacking. Faced with a disagreement, or what he called ‘ unpleasantness', Amos simply walked away – or if he was unable to do that, retreated to a mental sanctuary where there were no decisions to be made except those that concerned the land, no enemies but the foxes, the crows or inclement weather and certainly no shrill-voiced Bertha.

‘I hope the weather holds out for another day or two,' he said thoughtfully, gazing out at the purpling sky. ‘Another day or two and we can get that hay in. But I don't care for the look of the sky. It's very black over Bill's mother's.'

The blatant change of subject infuriated Bertha past the point of control and she banged on the table in a frenzy so that the sugar basin raided and the knives and forks jumped up and down on the plates.

‘Amos Pugh, sometimes I don't think you'm all there! You let Gilbert Morse walk all over you and then when I'm trying to talk sensible to you about what you've gone and done all you can think of is your hay!'

Amos did not reply. He could have told Bertha the hay was the single most important thing at the moment; without it the animals would go hungry when winter came. And she had been a farmer's wife long enough to know that life revolved around the weather. But to point this out would be to add fuel to the fire; leave Bertha alone and she would burn herself out in the end, though she had worked herself up into a rare old tizzy this time and no mistake!

He was still staring solidly out of the window when he heard the bub-bub-bub of an engine and Gilbert Morse's ‘motee car' turned into the farmyard. Gilbert was behind the wheel, clad in his cap, goggles and dustcoat, and beside him on the bucket seat was the small forlorn figure of Sarah.

‘They'm here,' he announced impassively.

‘
What
?' Bertha's voice reached a new pitch.

‘They'm here – Mr Morse and young Sarah.'

She flew to the window as if refusing to take his word for it, her anger becoming something close to panic.

‘
Here
? You didn't say nothing about them coming tonight! Oh my lord, just look at the state we'm in! Whatever is the matter with you, Amos?'

She rushed to the table, bundling the plates together with the knives and forks still between and depositing them hastily in the big stone sink. She could not bear to be caught at a disadvantage – she kept a good tidy house and she certainly did not want the Squire to think any different. As she dropped the half-eaten loaf of bread into the crock in the pantry she heard the knock on the back door; quickly she brushed the crumbs from the breadplate with her hand and stacked it on the slab behind the cheese dish.