The Stony Path (3 page)

She placed some kindling on the embers and blew it with the bellows until the fire sparked and sent flickering flames licking at the tinder-dry scraps of wood, muttering the while, ‘She won’t keep her mouth shut when the other un’s here, not Eva, an’ then there’ll be murder done. Aye, there will right enough. Murder.’

When the fire was blazing and the kettle was on the hob Alice forced herself to leave the kitchen, lighting the oil lamp before she left and placing it in the middle of the scrubbed table, and taking a tallow candle to guide her way upstairs.

She walked first into the room she had shared with Walter for the last twenty-two years, placing the tin candlestick holder in the small grate the room contained and then quickly stripping off her Sunday frock and small straw bonnet, which she placed on top of the chest of drawers. This item of furniture, along with a small double bed with a straw mattress and an ancient narrow wardrobe, made up the entire contents of the room, and the floorboards were bare, without even a clippy mat for cold winter mornings. Not that she minded about bare floors; it had been the straw-filled mattresses and pillows at the farm which had caused her several sleepless nights when she’d first come here, Alice reflected, pulling on her coarse print dress and the calico apron before slipping her feet into her working clogs. Even at the workhouse where she’d lived the first fourteen years of her life, before coming to work for Walter’s ailing mother, they’d had flock mattresses. It had taken her weeks to get used to the straw piercing her face and pricking her body through her calico nightdress.

They would have flock-filled mattresses at Stone Farm, she’d be bound; Hilda was going to have to get used to plenty once the newly-weds were back, same as Alice herself had when she’d first come here. She nodded to the thought, not without some satisfaction. She didn’t like her son’s new wife and the airs and graces Hilda adopted.

Stone Farm might be a grand place compared to this, but when all was said and done, Hilda had no real claim to it. Her stepbrother’s mother had died in childbirth with Frederick, her first child, and when Frederick Weatherburn’s father had married Hilda’s mother, some eight years later, the woman had been a widow and Hilda a little lassie of three or thereabouts. So Hilda was barely related to Frederick in truth.

Alice found this thought comforting and it was not the first time she had dwelt on it, but now, as she heard her husband in the kitchen below, she was galvanised into action.

Eva’s small room was the last of the three bedrooms the farmstead boasted, and like her parents’ and brother’s rooms was devoid of comfort and merely provided a narrow iron bed with a straw mattress, and a row of pegs on one wall for her clothes.

Alice opened the door quickly and stepped inside, shutting it behind her and walking over to the bed, which was set under the window and directly facing the door. She felt very tired and had a sick sensation in the pit of her stomach, but it was less to do with the rich food the wedding feast had provided than the catastrophe her children had brought upon them all.

There was a feeling of revulsion in her as she stared down at the dim shape of her daughter on the bed, but it was threaded through with a certain amount of reluctant pity. Walter had all but ripped the clothes from Eva’s back when she had fought him, but big as her daughter was, Walter was bigger. By the time Eva had reached the end of herself and her clothes were hanging in strips, her father had still possessed the strength to use his belt on her. He would have killed her if she and Henry hadn’t finally managed to drag him away. Alice ran the back of her hand over her dry lips. Numerous times they’d tried but Walter had shaken them off like an enraged bull and gone back to the squirming figure on the floor.

The memory mellowed Alice’s voice as she said, ‘You awake, lass?’ It was probably the softest tone she had ever used to her daughter, but then, as she lowered the flickering candle to the trussed form on the bed and the small flame illuminated the enmity blazing forth from the green eyes, it surprised her into taking a hasty step backwards.

Alice’s face was a touch paler and the hand holding the candle was trembling when she again stepped close to the bed, but her voice carried its old strident note when she said, ‘Don’t you dare look at me like that, girl, not after what you’ve done. You should be cryin’ an’ beggin’ the Almighty to forgive you – aye, an’ your da an’ me an’ all. When I think of the shame of it, an’ to entice Henry to fall so low! Wicked you are, wicked.’ She stared at Eva and the green eyes stared back at her above the gag Walter had ordered must remain in place while they were out, and then Alice emphasised her words again as she repeated, ‘Wicked, through an’ through.’

But bad as she was, Eva was still a human being; they couldn’t keep her tied up like this forever. She’d been twenty-four hours now without food or drink, and those weals on her back and legs needed more goose fat.

Alice put the candle holder on the floor by the bed, saying as she did so, her voice deep and flat, ‘I’m goin’ to take the gag off, an’ if you know what’s good for you you’ll keep quiet, girl. Your da’s downstairs an’ he’ll not take any nonsense, you understand me?’

Eva’s hair was caught in the strip of cloth Alice had tied so hastily that morning. Her daughter had been dozy from the excessive dose of laudanum Alice had forced down her minutes before, but even so Eva had wrestled against Walter’s grip as he’d held her down for Alice to reapply the gag, and it had been an uphill struggle to get it in place.

As soon as her mouth was free, Eva’s voice came in a croak, saying, ‘He’s married?’

Not a word of remorse. Henry, it was always Henry. Alice straightened, her voice rising again as she cried, ‘Aye, he is, all legal an’ proper like, so that’s that an’ there’s nothin’ you can do about it, girl. An’ this marriage was Henry’s idea, don’t forget that. Biggest gliff of me life I got the day he told us he was walkin’ out with Hilda Craggs, Weatherburn’s stepsister, an’ her as plain as a pikestaff an’ with a tongue on her an’ all. We might not sit at a fancy table of an evenin’ an’ have a cook an’ kitchen maid to wait on us, but to my mind Henry could’ve done better than Hilda Craggs.’

Alice’s voice had lowered on the last words; Walter had a pair of cuddy-lugs that could hear the grass grow, and she knew he’d hear no word against the match. The farm was all that mattered to him, it always had been, and he was looking at Frederick Weatherburn’s stepsister as a means to an end.

‘I’m havin’ a bairn, Mam.’

Alice had been about to tackle the ropes biting into her daughter’s wrists and ankles, but now she froze, one hand going to her throat and the other clutching the material of the apron at her waist, and her voice was a whimper when she murmured, ‘No, please God, no. No, Eva. Tell me you’re lyin’.’

‘I’m not lyin’.’

It was the underlying note of fear beneath the flatness which convinced Alice her daughter was indeed speaking the truth. Her mouth opened and shut twice before she was able to say, ‘Does ... does he know? Henry?’

‘No.’ Eva shut her eyes tightly, and when she opened them again Alice saw – for the first time in everything which had happened, including the beating her father had inflicted – tears glistening in the green eyes. ‘I was goin’ to tell him when you found us, but ... but I didn’t think he’d go through with it anyway – marryin’ her – not when it came down to it.’

‘How far gone are you?’

‘Not far. Two months.’

There was silence in the room for some seconds, and then, as Alice bent and began to slowly work at the knots in the rope at her daughter’s wrists, she said, ‘He’ll kill you. You know that, don’t you? He’ll kill you, girl.’ And Eva didn’t need to be told to whom her mother was referring.

Walter did not kill his daughter, but once Eva had washed herself in the tin bath in the scullery that, together with the dairy on one side and the kitchen on the other, made up the sum total of the downstairs of the farmhouse, he told his wife to take the girl to her room. He didn’t look at Eva as he spoke, neither did he acknowledge her presence, but once Alice had smoothed more goose fat on her daughter’s seared flesh and settled Eva in the remade bed with a glass of milk and a thick chunk of bread and dripping, Walter came to the threshold of the bedroom.

Eva stopped eating the moment he appeared, and although there was no trace of the cocksure daughter he knew in the quiet, white-faced girl who stared at him, her father noticed that the green gaze was steady and burning with some dark emotion. Well, that was all right, likely she’d need a remnant of her old spirit if what he had in mind came to pass. The thought was totally devoid of pity. ‘Your mam’s told you you stay put until I’ve made up me mind what’s to happen?’

Eva nodded once.

‘See you do, else you’ll be out of here in just the clothes you stand up in an’ it’ll be the workhouse. Do I make meself plain?’

Again the brown head nodded, but Walter noticed with some satisfaction that the white face had turned a shade paler. Alice had fed the bairns stories about her beginnings along with her milk, and both his son and his daughter had a healthy fear of the hell on earth that was the workhouse.

‘Da—’

Eva’s tentative voice came to an abrupt halt as Walter held up his hand, his palm towards her. ‘I’m not about to soil meself by havin’ a conversation with you.’ There was a moment of utter silence. ‘You’re nowt to me, dead an’ buried like the muck from the privy, but I care about me good name an’ you’ll not take that down with you while I’ve breath in me body.’

When the door was shut it was closed softly, which terrified the girl in the bed more than any show of temper could have done.

Eva sat hunched awkwardly on the old straw mattress, the blue and red weals and wounds inflicted by Walter’s buckled leather belt causing her whole body to feel as though it was on fire, but it was fear of what had been evident in her father’s face which was making her breath come in short, painful gasps. He meant to do for her. She stared across the room, the grotesque shadows from the flickering candle providing no comfort. Her mam wouldn’t let him do that, would she? Not in cold blood?

Suddenly she wasn’t hungry any more, and after finishing the milk she slowly placed the tin plate holding the bread and dripping on the floor and blew out the candle, sliding carefully under the thin grey blankets. Cautious though her movements were, they were enough to crack the worst of the congealed lesions criss-crossing her back, buttocks and legs, and she groaned out loud, holding herself stiff for a few minutes as her heart pumped like a piston and red-hot pokers prodded her body.

Henry was married,
married
. She stared wide-eyed into the darkness as the tears rained down her face. And he had left her at the mercy of their da, knowing what he could be like. All her dreams of living and working on the farm with Henry until her mam and da were gone, and the two of them were alone, were over. Henry had killed them at the altar that morning. Why couldn’t she hate him? She wanted to, so why couldn’t she? And what did the future hold for her now?

Eva found out what the future held two days later.

She had stayed in her room the whole time except for a visit to the privvy once it was dark to empty the pot under her bed, when she had taken the opportunity to sluice her head under the pump in the yard. The ends of her hair had been thick with the fat her mother had smeared over her back, and she had rubbed at them with a piece of the coarse hard soap from the scullery over and over again until they were clean.

The next morning she had stayed put as she’d been told, but after her mother had brought her a shive of bread and butter and a mug of hot tea, Eva had refused the offer of more goose fat on her wounds. Once she was alone again, and after eating her breakfast, she had eased off her calico nightdress, grimacing silently when the material stuck to dried blood in places.

Pulling on her flannel drawers, shift, dress and coarse white apron had been a painful and slow affair, but she had felt better once she was dressed. She had spent over an hour working the tangles out of her long thick hair, but in concentrating on her toilet she found she was able to keep her thoughts from the pictures that had been torturing her mind since the night of Henry’s wedding day. Mental images of Henry and Hilda. Intimate, earthy depictions that made her want to shout and scream and do herself harm. But she couldn’t do that, she mustn’t, because if she succumbed to what she was feeling her father would make sure all avenues to Henry were cut off, either by the workhouse or a mental asylum. That he was quite capable of incarcerating her in either place she had no doubt.

The long, hot day crept by with all the normal farm sounds outside her window, but inside her room Eva waited. She had seen her father drive off in the horse and cart mid-morning, and she felt in her bones that the business he was about concerned her.

Her mother brought her a bowl of bacon broth and a wedge of stottie cake at noon, expressing no surprise at seeing her daughter dressed, and remaining mute and tight-lipped as she left the room again without a word.

Eva forced herself to eat the broth, spooning the lentils, carrots, turnips, onions, potatoes and other vegetables into her mouth and swallowing them quickly before the ever-present nausea she was feeling overcame her. The two small dumplings she left in the bowl. The stottie cake was easier to get down; her mother always cooked the bread until it was firm and lightly brown, and its distinctive texture suited her queasy stomach.