Luckpenny Land (38 page)

‘Where is she?’ Meg quietly persisted.

Rosemary ignored the question. ‘Jeffrey hasn’t been at all well. On top of everything he’s recovering from a severe bout of influenza. It would quite ruin his health if word were to get out about that Katherine... You must promise me that you will say nothing, not a word to a soul? Promise!’

Meg grasped the hands that Rosemary was wringing with such anguish and squeezed them gently. ‘I will say nothing if that’s what you want, but you must tell me where she is. I am her best friend and surely have a right to know. I’m worried about her.’

Jeffrey Ellis chose this moment to walk into the sitting room. He was wearing a blue checked dressing gown though it was past eleven o’clock in the morning. He seemed pleased to see Meg. ‘Hello. How is the farm doing?’

‘Very well, thank you.’

Meg had always thought he was a man who carried a sort of quiet dignity about him, as all good medical men do. Now he seemed thinner, more tired, with an air of resignation or defeat about him. ‘Have you heard from Katherine?’ he asked, a pleading in his face, and Meg shook her head, unable to trust herself to speak as she watched the light of hope die in faded eyes so like Kath’s own. ‘I was hoping you might have. She’s adventuring somewhere. That’s my daughter, never still for a minute.’

Meg caught the expression in Rosemary’s eyes, begging her to leave. ‘I must go. Work to do, I’m afraid.’

Mr Ellis grasped her hand as she reached for the door handle. The grip was surprisingly firm. ‘You’d let me know if you did hear, wouldn’t you?’ It made her shiver to hear her own words of a moment ago echoed back to her. She smiled and nodded. Somehow she couldn’t see this gentle man as the censorious creature Rosemary made him out to be.

‘Of course.’

‘If she writes to anyone it will be to you.’ Which gave Meg pause for Kath had done no such thing. Why was that? Shame perhaps? How very silly.

At the front door she tried one last time. ‘I’ll write to her aunt once more then, just in case. Miss Ruby Nelson, isn’t it, Southview Villas? Perhaps she might have heard where Kath is by now.’

But Rosemary was pushing something into her hand, a scrap of paper, crisp and rustling, whispering feverishly as she glanced back over her shoulder, half an eye on her husband wandering like a lost soul into the drawing room. ‘You can check if she’s all right, if you like. Don’t come again. I don’t want her here. Not till she’s got rid of it. Then she can come home as if nothing had happened.’ The door closed firmly in Meg’s face.

Standing on the empty driveway Meg read the address.
Greenlawns Home for Wayward Girls.

‘I can’t go. Not yet, much as I’d like to. I’ll write and tell her that I’ll come as soon as the lambing is over.’

‘She’s your best friend,’ Effie pointed out.

‘The sheep are my livelihood, I can’t neglect them. It would take days to go to Liverpool, find this place and come home again. I’d have to stay overnight, maybe longer with the trains the way they are. She might refuse to see me.’ Meg wanted to drop everything that very minute and go and find Kath, but how could she? She simply daren’t risk leaving her flock at this important time.

‘What can I offer anyway? Her own mother won’t have her home.’

‘You could let her come here,’ Tam suggested.

‘I will. Oh, I will. There’s nothing I’d like better. I’ll bring her to Broombank where she can have all the love and care she needs. But I must be sensible.’ She looked from one to the other of them, begging them to understand. ‘The next weeks are the busiest in the farming calendar. I can’t leave now.’

There was no one else to stand in for her. Effie certainly couldn’t deal with the lambing, nor could Tam manage on his own, since he said himself that he was more used to horses. ‘I’m sorry, but it has to be. Mrs Ellis says she is being taken care of. We’ll just have to believe that.’

‘She also said that she hadn’t the first idea where Kath was,’ Tam reminded her, in his quiet, lilting voice.

Meg turned on him at once, upset by the implied criticism. ‘You go then. You find her if you think I’m so wrong.’

‘I didn’t say you were.’ He sighed. ‘This is your first lambing season. I don’t suppose another week or two will make much difference and I rather think you’re going to need all the help Effie and I can give.’

Effie puffed out her flat chest, pleased at being included. ‘I’ll keep you all fed, anyroad,’ she volunteered, just to make sure they understood that she wasn’t having anything to do with the underparts of sheep.

Tam grinned. ‘I’d like to see how it all pans out, so I’ll stay on if you don’t mind?’

Meg was surprised, alarmed by the offer and strangely relieved all at the same time. ‘I can’t pay you. Not yet anyway. Not till I sell the lambs in the backend probably.’

‘Did I ask for payment?’

‘Nobody works for nothing these days.’

‘I like to be different.’

‘You know nothing about sheep. What use would you be?’

‘I don’t think you can afford to be choosy. I’ll work for my keep to begin with. Let’s at least make sure you have some lambs to sell.’

He was far too sure of himself in Meg’s opinion. Whenever he stood about, watching her, she felt strangely inadequate and came over all ham-fisted and clumsy. And Thomas O’Cleary was too good-looking for his own good, certainly for hers. She daren’t think what Jack would have to say about this man staying here. Yet she needed help, very badly. Reluctantly, and with a strange excitement in her heart, she agreed.

‘All right. You can stay till the autumn sales. We’ll see how we get on.’

Tam smiled, as if he had known all along that she would agree.

Effie simply giggled.

‘Now that’s settled, perhaps we should work out a shift system. Them sheep will need watching round the clock, presumably,’ he said.

And so will you, came the unbidden thought.

The first lamb died. The failure was such a devastating blow that Meg redoubled her efforts to shepherd them more carefully. It was important that she had a good crop of lambs this year if she was to build up the flock. She set an alarm clock by her bed. Every two hours it woke her and she would pull on her boots and raincoat, usually with her eyes still half-closed, pick up her torch, and walk out into the bitter cold night to check her precious flock. Her successes were sweet but every time a lamb died she blamed herself, whether justifiably or not.

The ewes were not in their best condition. They’d had a hard time of it through the frost and snow, so mortality was bound to be high. Broombank did better than some places lower in the dales and Meg knew she shouldn’t complain.

Then came the day when she had to skin a dead one and pull its skin over a live orphaned lamb so that the bereaved mother would accept it as her own. Meg performed the task but then went and vomited her breakfast into the hedge.

Could Joe have been right? Was farming too tough for a woman? Determined to prove herself, she refused help from anyone. Out every morning before dawn she spent all day amongst her flock, missing meals and far too much sleep.

‘I have me pride, for God’s sake,’ Tam said. ‘If I can birth a mare surely a ewe isn’t all that different? You can trust me to do a shift on me own, surely? You’ll be no good to anyone if you collapse.’

Shame-faced, feeling oddly light-headed, Meg allowed Tam and Effie to chase her off to bed for a proper night’s sleep at last.

It was Effie’s task to feed the orphan lambs that a ewe rejected or had insufficient milk for.

Meg came down to the kitchen one morning to find them all gathered, bleating madly, about Effie’s legs.

‘They’re driving me crackers,’ Effie mourned. She was holding two bottles at once to a pair of fiercely sucking lambs while the others desperately nuzzled her hand wanting their own share. Meg watched as she got herself a mug of tea, a smile on her face.

‘How do you know which ones you’ve fed?

Effie gave her an anguished look. ‘You might well ask.’ The two bottles were now empty and Effie dabbed a blob of milk on the top of each head to identify the two fed lambs then went to refill the bottles with fresh mixture. The moment her back was turned the other lambs leapt upon the first two and quickly licked off the delicious fluid. Meg burst into laughter.

‘I don’t think your system is working.’ She explained what she’d just seen.

Effie stared at the milling lambs in despair. ‘Drat! No wonder some get fat while the others stay skinny.’

Effie met Meg’s gaze, brimming with laughter, and burst into giggles. Then they were both laughing so much Meg was clutching her sides in agony. ‘Oh, the thought of them licking up the milk as fast as you mark them. ‘They were off again and it was some moments before the two of them could wipe away tears and bring themselves back under control.

‘Well, come on, what do you suggest?’ Effie asked.

‘How about some sort of label?’

So luggage labels were found, one attached to each lamb and duly numbered.

‘Now you start at one, mark it, and keep going, in order, till they’re all fed. Easy.’

‘Let’s hope they don’t eat labels,’ chuckled Effie. But the system did seem to work and the lambs started to thrive better after that.

It was the middle of May before Meg felt it safe to take time off from her duties. A familiar twittering warble told her that Broombank’s swallows had returned to take up summer residence and there were five blue eggs in the dunnock’s nest by the gate.

The lambing season had been longer and harder than Meg could ever have imagined. But her first crop of lambs were safely delivered, smaller than she would have liked, but it was a start.

Oh, and how she had loved watching them grow, seeing them play ‘I’m the King of the Castle’ each evening as they gambolled and frolicked on the knolls of grass about the farm, as lambs are supposed to do. It filled her with such pride to watch them that it took her twice as long to get her chores done. She had survived her first winter, and the knowledge seemed to give her fresh courage, ready to face anything, even this sour-faced woman who was taking an age to answer a simple question.

She tried to imagine Kath sitting here in this green painted room in exactly the same way. Though not quite the same, for Kath’s mind would no doubt have been a turmoil of misery and confusion, worrying over her baby and her future. How long had she been in this place? Six, seven months? Maybe longer.

Meg had disliked Miss Blake on sight. There was a smell about the place, rather like the paraffin and sand they used to spread over ‘accidents’ in infant school. It made her feel uneasy.

‘She probably came at the end of last year,’ Meg helpfully pointed out. ‘A pretty girl, with fair hair worn in a bob.’

The woman sniffed. ‘They’re all pretty, or so they think.’

Meg watched as she leafed painstakingly through a long slim book, wishing she would hurry up. Meg wanted to get this mission done with and be back on the train before nightfall. This was not a time to linger in Liverpool.

The wisdom of her coming had been debated long and hard for some weeks. They’d listened to the news every night, horrified by what was happening. The phoney war was turning into a real one as Hitler occupied Denmark, Norway, Holland, and swept on through Belgium to France. Mr Chamberlain had gone and Winston Churchill was now Prime Minister, promising them nothing but ‘blood, sweat, toil and tears’.

‘What if you get bombed?’ Effie had asked, panic in her voice. Tam calmly told her that nothing of the sort had yet happened so why should they choose to drop one on Meg the moment she set foot in the city. Tam O’Cleary was good at easing tension, Meg had discovered. But then he was good at a lot of things.

She’d taken the train to Southport and been forced practically to bully the directions to Greenlawns out of Ruby Nelson. It was as well she had since nobody in Liverpool seemed to have heard of the place.

Miss Blake paused at a page in her large blue book, peering through narrow rimmed spectacles. ‘Ah, here we are. Yes, we did take in a girl by that name: Katherine Margaret Ellis, aged twenty. She came to us in November last. Yes, I remember her now.’

Meg felt a flood of relief. ‘Is she still here?’

The pale eyes regarded her in vaguely troubled surprise. ‘She has not been a particularly good influence upon our other, er, residents. Something of a trouble-maker is our Miss Ellis.’

Meg’s lips twitched. ‘May I see her, please?’

‘That is rather irregular. It can be most unsettling for our girls to have visitors from the outside.’

‘From the outside?’ Meg echoed the words in amazement.

Miss Blake leaned forward. ‘Are her family ready to reclaim her?’

Reclaim her? Meg was horrified by such language, but was forced to admit that they weren’t. Miss Blake sniffed, almost with pleased satisfaction.

‘You must appreciate that most of our girls have been abandoned, by their family, by their friends, by society. There is nowhere for them to go. The charity of Greenlawns is all they have to depend on.’

‘Kath - Katherine - has not been abandoned. She still has friends. Me, for instance.’ Meg smiled sweetly, grey eyes issuing a challenge.