The Devil in Clevely (Afternoon of an Autocrat) (11 page)

She still hesitated, engaged in one of her inward debates. It was dark; she was late and the parcel was heavy. Also, in her hour of need Danny had arrived; it looked as if God had sent him. Perhaps it would be all right. 'Well, thank you very much.' she said. Danny climbed nimbly into the cart and held out his hand to help her up.

The old horse turned unwillingly and went slowly in the direction which for him was all wrong, leading as it did away from his stable, his well-earned supper. Danny did nothing to hurry him.

The seat of the cart was a plank, stretched from side to side and capable of being removed when the vehicle was needed for farm work; one half of this seat was occupied at the moment by a big linen bag full of snippets of silk and velvet which Danny had that afternoon collected from Miss Jackson, the dressmaker. Mrs Fuller, during the long winter evenings which were her only leisure, occupied herself by making patchwork quilts which were popular in the six parishes as 'bride gifts'. She had a standing arrangement with her cousin the dressmaker by which all 'pieces' were exchanged for a dressed fowl, a dozen eggs, a loin of pork and a pound of butter now and again.

Earlier in the afternoon, seeing Danny off to Baildon, Mrs Fuller had said, 'And take my piece-bag along. And don't go chucking it in the back of the cart like you did last time. All the pieces stank of muck and the bag had to be washed. Tie it on the seat aside you.'

So there it was, and there were Damask and Danny forced to sit very close to one another on the other half of the seat. And Danny was large; he had his father's big bones, not yet stripped and made angular by constant hard labour, and he was better nourished than his father had been in his youth, for Mrs Fuller was not one of those farm-wives who marketed the best produce and fed her family on what was left. Early in her married life she had made that plain to Mr Fuller when he once ventured to mention that his mother's habit had been to 'make do with what's over'.

'Your mother bore eight children and reared two and your father died at forty! Glory be to God, what's the use of a farm if it can't feed you? Before my family starve in the midst of plenty we'll leave the farm and move into town where I could earn food at least.' That silenced Fuller, whose wife before her marriage had kept a thriving little pastry-cook's shop in Baildon and made money with her quilts besides. So Danny and his sister Susan had grown up straight and strong and handsome beyond the average, and their father, despite his hard work and what Mrs Fuller called his 'worritting nature', had already outlived his father by six years.

Sitting in such close contact Danny and Damask were very much aware of one another. He could smell the odour of the cobbler's workroom in which her hood had hung all afternoon; he could smell soap and now and again an elusive whiff of lavender and rosemary. But he could also smell something more positive and pervasive, the ghost-stink of the muck for which the cart had been used during the week. That brought something else to mind and provoked the first remark to be made during the drive.

'Father's going to try stall-feeding some beasts this winter,' he said. 'He took the kitchen for a byre and Mother agreed to try it if he promised to buy a gig with the first profits he made. She's been mad for a gig ever since Fred Clopton bought his.'

She could find nothing to say to that. On the fringe of her mind there dwelt for a moment the certainty that it was all concerned with a worldly and therefore unworthy ambition, something her father would decry, but it seemed not to matter very much just now. 'Would you like to ride in a gig, Damask?' 'I don't know. This is really the first proper ride I've ever had in a cart even. My only other ride was in Shad's donkey rig.'

The idea that a ride in the despised old farm cart could be a treat, an experience, was amazing, and touching.

'I tell you what,' he said, 'I'll bring the cart and drive you the whole way next time. When will you get out next? Next Saturday?'

'Oh no. I have a Saturday once a month. The others get two--they're very lenient at Muchanger--but my other day out is a Sunday so I can go to chapel.'

The last word dashed him, reminded him of her difference, her primness, the withheld prettiness which he resented. But that only lasted a moment, because he could feel her there pressed against his arm and thigh, very small, and warm and soft, and smelling so nice and clean. 'Four weeks from now, then, I'll call for you and drive you home.'

'I know you mean kindly, but that wouldn't do. It wouldn't do at all.'

'Why not?'

'I told you.'

'Told me what?' This was the kind of conversation he was most at home with, half-teasing, half-probing, trying to make a girl say something out of which something else could be made.

'You know. You know as well as I do, Danny Fuller. You've got a bad name. You're always running after girls and taking them to the Midsummer Fair as though you meant to marry them, and then you don't.'

'Well, what if I do? I like girls, I just go on looking for a girl I can keep on liking when I really know her. I never did find one, but you can't blame me for that. Now just suppose--suppose, I said--you turned out to be that girl and then wouldn't have anything to do with me just because I'd had the sense to wait for you. Wouldn't that be a pity?'

She laughed then, and he was delighted that she could laugh just like any other girl.

'I bet you say something like that to every girl you take up with! When your mother made you go to school for a year she said it was so you could learn to reckon, but I think you learned disputation too.'

'Disputation. What's that?'

'It's making an argument--not twisting exactly, but making what you say make other people see things your way. I know about it because it's something the travelling preachers do. People sometimes jump up and ask awkward questions and try to make them look silly, and that's where disputation comes in.'

'And are you trying to make me look silly?' he asked, seizing upon the one phrase which would allow him to drag the talk back to the desired line.

'Of course not. I'm the one who would look silly if I believed that you had been waiting for me.'

'But it might be true.' Something that had been working in him ever since she had confessed her fear of Lady Alice's ghost assured him that it was true, but then he'd thought that so many times before and he'd always been wrong so far.

'It might be true,' he repeated. 'You might give a chap a chance to find out, Damask.'

There! He knew now. Another symptom. That something special in the name, the pleasure of saying it. Phyllis, Agnes, Daisy, Rose, Joan...name after name had been briefly lighted and made special by the charm of the girl who owned it. Cissie, Martha, Jill, Jennie...name after name had darkened, waned, become just another name as the girl who owned it became just another girl. He seldom took time from his girl-chasing to remember the past or think about the future, but now for a moment he did so, and was sobered. Damn nearly twenty-five and no nearer being settled than he was at eighteen. Something, anything, a look, a chance word, would set him off and he'd be hot after a wench for weeks; then, suddenly, out it would all go, like a blown candle, and his chief feeling would be one of relief that he'd never yet been hasty enough to marry a girl. It would be awful to wake up one morning and find yourself tied for life to a girl who had ceased to attract you. What could be worse?

He had time to think while he waited for her answer, and some excitement crept in and mingled with his thoughts. Damask wasn't like other girls; it would be a new experience to break down her primness, coax her into loosening those plaits. Every drop of his hunter's blood moved swiftly to meet a challenge which it met all too rarely. He was handsome and merry, and some deep instinct had restricted his chase to a class of girl to whom a farmer's son was a 'catch'; most of them had come halfway to meet him. This was different. Still she did not answer; and at last he said: 'Well? How about me meeting you next time you're out?'

'No. That wouldn't do,' she said. 'And I'd be obliged if you'd drop me here, outside the gate. If anybody saw us I should never hear the last of it.'

'And would you mind? Really?'

'I should hate it. I can bear being teased about what is true, but not...not something that isn't.'

'Do you get teased?'

'A bit.'

And again he knew he had been 'set off', for he felt belligerent towards those who teased her. Damn it all, why shouldn't she be a Methodist? There were worse things to be! He could think of a whole host of worse things. And what if she did scrape her hair back in that unbecoming fashion; she did keep it clean. He remembered several girls who were pretty to look at from a distance but not very nice close to... 

'I said stop. Please, Danny.'

'Just as you say,' he said, pleased that she had used his name. The old horse seemed to halt of his own accord, and before Danny could move Damask had pushed past the parcel and scrambled down on the far side of the cart, so that he could not even help her. 'And I'm not to see you again--ever?'

'No. But thank you for bringing me back...and stopping here...and coming along just when you did. Goodbye.'

Entranced rather than deterred by his rebuff, Danny turned the horse again and rattled away to his home, where, over a belated supper table, his father had just broken the news about Sir Charles's attitude towards the stall-feeding.

'So there they stand, pretty as a picture, and there they'll stand on Tuesday when he come nosing back. He've done his worst now and can't damage me no more till Lady Day, and then we'll all be out in the road, fat bullocks and all.'

Mrs Fuller cherished, like many other women in the village and the district, a curious, respectful, sentimental feeling for the old Squire. When he praised her kitchen, or said she looked well and bonny, or accepted her cake and wine, her self-esteem warmed and expanded and something very near to worshipful love moved in her heart. It was something which she had never felt towards Steve Fuller; and when Steve, blurting out the whole miserable story, said, 'He even arst how you'd manage without a kitchen, making out I was doing you a wrong,' her immediate feeling was, Ah yes, he would think of that, he's a gentleman!

But all that was froth, a dreamy nothing. Her attitude towards her husband might be mainly maternal instead of the dog-looking-up-to-kind-master one which every woman in her heart longs to attain, but, simply for that reason, any attack on Steve was a battle cry.

'Let him come here on Tuesday,' she said, 'and he'll get a piece of my mind! As you say, the damage is done now and I'll tell him something he 'on't forget in a hurry. And don't you go fretting, my dear. We can manage. I hear the Claughton at Colchester is minded to retire and sell his shop. S'pose we could get hold of that! I could make a living there! And failing that there's hundreds of places. Don't you fret. We can manage.'

Danny came in, knowing that, what with his lingering in the King's Head at Baildon and then turning about and going back to Muchanger, he was dreadfully late this time. Being late when he had been out afoot was not serious, but old Short's hours, being numbered, must be accounted for.

'I brought the pieces, Mother, and a damned long time I had to wait while Miss Jackson collected them. And I've got news for you, Dad. Squire fell off his horse and broke his neck this evening!'

Fuller said 'Thank God for that' before he remembered what he had said to the bullock; Mrs Fuller said 'Oh no! Poor dear man!' before she remembered what Sir Charles had said to her husband. Danny, looking from one to another of them and seeing that his lateness would pass unremarked, said cheerfully: 'I've got a feeling that everything will alter now; tonight will be a sort of turning-point.'

On the next evening, which was Sunday, the chapel at Nettleton gained a new attendant at the evening service. He came in at the last moment, took a seat at the back and slipped away before anyone could speak to him. Amos was preaching that evening, and as soon as he saw the familiar face in such unfamiliar surroundings, he hastily changed the subject of his discourse and preached a very earnest sermon about the joy in Heaven over one repentant sinner. He slipped from the pulpit and hurried to the door as quickly as he could and was greatly disappointed to find Danny gone; they could have walked home together and he could have continued his exhortation on more intimate terms.

Danny went home disappointed but not downcast. She had said a Sunday, not which one, and he would go on attending until he hit on the right one. The wasted evening, the long walk meant little. Once, long ago, at the Midsummer Fair, he'd been 'set off' by a girl who was helping her father to sell his pills--guaranteed to cure everything short of a broken bone. He'd been obliged to buy a great number of pills in order to obtain a few minutes' conversation with her, and she had told him that they were going next to Bywater. An invented errand had gained him possession of the horse and cart and he'd gone to Bywater and stayed there three days. The pill vendor and his daughter had never appeared, and when Danny went home his father had beaten him with his belt, that being during the period when Steve still hoped to knock the nonsense out of him.

On the next Sunday evening, as he slipped into place, he knew, before ever looking round, that Damask was there; and so she was, sitting beside Amos, who had not been called to preach at Summerfield after all. Danny edged along the seat, awkwardly because his legs were too long for the space allowed, until he could see her without obviously straining his neck; and there he sat, feasting his eyes on the knot of plaits he had once thought so regrettable, and on the straight narrow shoulders and slim waist in the ugly slate-coloured dress. A dispassionate observer might have considered him very lucky to have something to distract his attention from the sermon, for it was Abel Shipton's turn to preach, and his sermons were a trial even to the most earnest and well-disciplined members. Not only were they painfully dull; they were delivered slowly, over-emphatically and in a voice which was afflicted with a peculiar disability.