The Black Mountains (33 page)

And times had changed, too. Whereas before carting boys had been hard to come by, now there were plenty of lads who, for one reason or another, were thinking on the same lines as Reg Adams and deciding that the coalfield might be as good a place as any to hide away for the duration of the war. And they, Ted realized, could be his passport out of the pit. But if Reg was right, and some kind of compulsion was going to be brought in, he'd have to do something about it—and quickly.

Ted crawled on, wishing desperately he could get out of the dark tunnels and into the green quiet of one of the woods behind his home.

He couldn't stay in the pits for years, he was certain of that much. As long as he did so, there was not much future for him, and none at all for his hopes of taking Rebecca away from her father. He couldn't ask her to live in a poky cottage, even if he could find one. She was worth more than that. And the thought of seeing her worn down by too much work and too many babies was painful to him. He wanted Becky—wanted her so much his whole body ached for her—but not on those terms.

No, he would have to try and take her away—right away—so that they could start again. But what could he do that would raise enough money to keep them both? Go to the Welsh coal-field, maybe, where seams were thick and colliers paid good wages—or even to Yorkshire. More than one lad had packed his bags and headed north. But to do either meant leaving Rebecca alone with her father, at least until he could find a home for her.

If only she'd marry me now, Ted thought. She could live with Mam for a while. There's plenty of room now with half the family gone, and she'd be company for Mam, too.

Grunting, he emptied the tub of its load and set off back to the face. Maybe he wouldn't be doing this again too many times, he thought. Maybe before Christmas there'd be some new lad carting for James, and he, Ted, would be off to make a new life.

That evening after he had washed and changed, Ted told Charlotte he had to give someone an urgent message. Then, without waiting for the question that was forming on Charlotte's lips, Ted made his way down to see Marjorie at Fords.

Tonight, he did not hesitate outside the shop, but went straight in. Marjorie was tidying fixtures, but when she saw him a strange expression crossed her face. She climbed down from the steps so rapidly that she almost fell, and he wondered briefly if she had overheard the commotion the night before.

“Ted Hall, what are you doing here again?”

He glanced around to see if Mrs Ford was in evidence “I wanted you to give Rebecca a message for me.”

“Oh Lord, you don't know then.”

“Know what?” he asked, mystified.

“She's gone, Ted.”

“Gone? Gone where?” he repeated stupidly.

Marjorie's face was flushed, and she patted her hair with a small, distracted movement.

“I don't know. All I know is she's gone. The car came for her first thing this morning, and I heard them say it was for the station at Bath. Then he came out—Mr Church—and Rebecca, and all her cases. He's packed her off somewhere, out of your way I should think. But I've no idea where she's gone, or when she'll be back. Knowing him, maybe she never will be.”

Ted stared at her, too shocked to even begin to understand the implications of what she had told him. Then, dazed, he turned and left the shop.

As Ted left the shop, someone watched from a window that overlooked the street.

In her starched cap and apron, Rosa Clements, the Ford's new housemaid, looked as demure as the strictest of mistresses could have wished, and only her eyes revealed the turmoil of emotion within her.

It worked! she thought, and excitement, rising inside her in a sharp, dizzying rush, made her shake so violently that she had to hold on to the cream-painted window sill for support. It worked—I got rid of her! But, oh, I wish I hadn't seen his face. I wish I hadn't seen how much he cared …

Rosa had been in love with Ted for as long as she could remember. It seemed there had never been a time when she had not wanted him, or when one glance, idly thrown in her direction, had not made her heart sing. As a child, she had followed him everywhere until he had told her to clear off. But that had not lessened her love. For a while it had hurt, but little by little her love had grown again, and she had gone back to sitting at the upstairs window of the little house in Greenslade Terrace to watch him go whistling up the rank, or standing with her back against the outhouse wall while the others played hopscotch, staring intently at his house, willing him to come out and speak to her.

Even in those days, she had tried to make spells or put a charm on him. She had gathered herbs and wild flowers on her lonely expeditions through the woods and mashed them into paste in her room at night when her brothers were asleep. But for all that she had believed in them, they had never worked—except for the one she'd woven the night after she'd found him crying because his dog had disappeared. Yes, she'd got it right that time, but the others, the important ones, to make him smile at her or notice her, hadn't worked at all, and Rosa had begun to doubt the thing she hoped most of all was true—that it was not Irish tinker's blood that ran in her veins, but pure Romany—the blood that carries the secrets of spells and curses handed down from generation to generation, and weaves an age-old magic, and sees the future. Above all things, Rosa wanted that, maybe even more than she wanted Ted. For if she could make spells, all things were possible. And if she were a Romany, or even a witch, she would be someone in her own right at last.

Rosa Clements had been born at the turn of the century. She drew her first breath when the trees were bursting with new green life and pink and white blossoms hung heavily upon the apple trees. Between spasms of pain as she fought to bring her daughter into the world, Ada, had looked at the apple trees through the dusty bedroom window and tried to find an omen in their beauty, or at least a reason for hope. It was less than eight months since she had wed Walter Clements, and she knew that tongues were wagging in Hillsbridge. What was more, she knew what they were saying. For there were plenty of people who had seen her creeping out of the market yard, where the fun fair wintered, on the evenings when Walter had been working a back shift that last year before their marriage. And when the fair had returned the following year, those same people watched eagerly to see if a certain swarthy young man was still amongst their number.

Ada had pictured him as she sweated and laboured that day in the spring of 1900. She closed her eyes and saw again the dark-skinned face, the thick curling hair and the deep, jet eyes that could tempt and tantalize. She heard his mocking laugh, and saw the muscular, weather-tanned shoulders that were as different from Walter's fair-skinned puny frame as could be. As the pain intensified she fancied she heard the raucous music of the merry-go-round, and when it seemed that the fire deep inside her would tear her in two, somewhere on the edge of her consciousness he was there, riding around and around, legs splayed to balance himself against the sway of the merry-go-round, one careless hand resting on a wooden support, the other stretched out as if to invite her once more to his caravan.

As Rosa grew, there were others, too, who remembered. When her hair grew thick and dark, and they saw the lustre of her black eyes, they nudged one another and whispered in triumph. They'd been right, then, in what they'd suspected, right when they'd speculated that Walter, simple as he was, had taken for his wife a woman who was no better than she should be. But the thing they'd all have given a good deal to learn was whether or not poor Walter knew.

Years passed. Ada bore Walter five more children, all sons, and all as pale skinned as Rosa was dark. In the process she grew thin and scrawny, and her hands, once her pride and joy, became red and knotted. She no longer went to the market yard in winter, and although no roving-eyed fair man would invite her into his bed now, she was still looked on as a common whore. As if they needed some excitement in their own drab lives, the townspeople kept alive the rather pitiful figure who walked with a quick, nervous stoop and who would probably not survive the results of another night of abandoned love.

Rosa, too, came in for her share of notoriety. At school, the other children, who had been told without explanation to keep away from her, treated her with a mixture of fascination and fear, but none wanted to be her friend, and Rosa, who was always more at home in the woods and under the stars, kept to herself. Once, she asked Ada what it was that made people avoid her, but Ada busied herself with her washing, turning her back on Rosa and sinking her arms elbow deep in the steaming water.

“You'm different,” she said shortly. “Folk are always funny with anybody a bit different.”

Rosa could get no more from her, and she did not ask again. But she began listening to the talk when she could, standing so still and so silent that it was easy to forget she was there at all, and she compared the way she looked with the fairness of her parents and her brothers.

After much consideration, she came to a conclusion. She was a foundling. It was the only answer.

At first the thought frightened her, for it seemed she had suddenly lost everything that had made her feel safe—her family, her name, even her identity. Then, gradually, excitement stirred as she realized the wonderful, endless possibilities.

If she was not Rosa Clements, she could be anyone. It was like being born again, with the world to choose from.

She debated the possibilities sitting in the fork of a tree in the woods above Greenslade Terrace. She stared at her own dark-skinned reflection in the cracked mirror above her wash-stand. But it was when the black cat from along the rank had come to her one day purring and rubbing itself around her legs that she had known.

I'm a witch, she thought. I'm a witch-child, and that's why they left me. And she smiled a secret smile and laughed softly to herself because, if she was a witch, then it made her more important than any of them, and there was nothing she could not do.

For a while, she was satisfied with the knowledge, but then the desire to test her powers began to gnaw at her—and with it the problems of being a witch-child separated from all other witches. For who was there to teach her spells and magic incantations? Who could show her which herbs had special properties and which were useless to her?

She began to experiment, choosing the wild garlic that grew by the river because of its pungent smell, and the cuckoo pint and the berries she knew to be poisonous. Once she even crept from her bed to see if she could find some “ flowers of the night,” and in the dark fields, with only an owl hooting across the valley, she was not afraid, but alive and tingling with a strange excitement.

In the morning, however, when Ada found her stockings damp and stuck with burrs, there were questions she could not answer, and she knew her night-time expeditions would have to be kept for very special occasions.

When she was eleven years old, her world almost fell to pieces around her ears. In a rash moment, when the teasing of her school friends had become almost too much to bear, she had shouted at them that they had better beware, for she was a witch. But they only laughed at her.

“You're not a witch, you're a gypsy,” one of them taunted, and Rosa recoiled as swiftly as if she had been stung.

A gypsy—no, she couldn't be! She thought of the families of poor, ingratiating tinkers who went from door to door with their baskets of clothes-pegs and paper flowers, begging from folk scarcely better off than they were, and her heart sank. Had they left her on a doorstep in a basket along with the clothes-pegs? It was a thought so awful it made her curl up inside, yet it had to be faced. They were dark-skinned as she was. Their eyes in their wizened, nut-brown faces were black, like hers. But she didn't want to be a gypsy—oh, she didn't want to be a gypsy! Unless …

Unless she were a Romany. Now that would be something different again. Romanies lived in bright painted caravans and burned them when the occupant died, together with everything they owned. Romanies were bold and free, spoke a language of their own, slept under the stars. Romanies could read palms and tea leaves; they knew the future—and the past. Oh, it would be good to be a Romany …

The thought satisfied her, and even as she grew older, she clung to it. Even when she began to realize that the foundling story was unlikely to be more than the figment of a child's imagination, she never doubted that there ran in her veins blood that was wilder and more free than that of the people she called her parents, a blood that responded with restless longing to the call of the woods and the fields, and knew truths that they would never know. Deep inside, she recognized some part of her that was at one with nature and with super-nature, and she spurned the ordinary, everyday folk in their ordinary, everyday houses, living their ordinary, everyday lives.

All except Ted. She adored him with a passion that was boundless and also irrational. For she knew that for him she would sacrifice the woods and the fields, for him she would live just as the rest of Hillsbridge lived. For him, she would cook and clean and mend, and bear and raise all the children he wanted. And she would be proud and happy to be his wife—and perhaps a little relieved, too, that she would no longer be the one on the outside—the one at whom fingers pointed and shoulders shrugged.

She first knew she wanted to marry him the day his brother Jim wed Sarah Brimble. She watched from the upstairs window as the wagonette carrying the bridal party lurched along the rank, and she dreamed of the day when she would be the one to sit proudly in a white dress with flowers in her hair. Her dark eyes grew huge in her thin face as she pictured it, and love swelled inside her until she had thought she would burst.

Two years had passed since that day, but Rosa's love for Ted had not dimmed. She was hurt when she saw him with other girls, but she had told herself her time would come. To him, she was still a child, but she would not always be a child. With pride she watched her thin body round into the curves of womanhood and the roses begin to colour her sallow cheeks. Soon, she thought, she would be ready to make him notice her. She would paint her lips scarlet and draw her thick hair away from her face so that it did nothing to hide her huge dark eyes. She had experimented secretly in the cracked mirror above the wash-stand and been pleased with the result. But she was not quite ready. She must wait for her breasts to fill out that little bit more. Then he would not doubt she was a woman. And in the meantime, what did it matter if he played around with every girl in Hillsbridge? She would soon outstrip them all.