The Stony Path (46 page)

‘As you like, Mother. As you like.’ She didn’t have the time or the inclination to argue with her, Polly thought to herself as she walked downstairs. She couldn’t ever remember feeling such a consuming tiredness as was on her now, although she blessed it in a way. When her head touched the pillow at night she was asleep, and slumber meant the gnawing core of hatred at the centre of her being slept too. Hatred against a dead man; hatred against her husband; against the injustice that had made a beast like Arnold so much stronger and physically powerful than a woman; against the disease that had taken her beloved granny and grandda at a time when she most needed to see their dear faces . . .

She forced her mind away from such weakening thoughts as she opened the door to the kitchen, but immediately she saw Betsy’s face and Emily sitting at the table, her eyes pink-rimmed, she knew there was further trouble. ‘What is it?’

‘Me da.’ Emily sniffed loudly, rubbing the back of her hand across her nose as she said, ‘He’s been bad for days an’ not told anyone, an’ now he’s turnin’ inside out. I’d better get back to him.’

So her mother had been right after all. Polly stared at the little kitchen maid. It wasn’t over yet.

It definitely wasn’t over.

Polly had been planning to move into her grandparents’ room once the farmhouse returned to normal while she thought about what she was going to do in the immediate future. With her grandparents gone she didn’t intend to remain living as Frederick’s wife, but the spectre of Arnold’s body in its icy tomb seemed to dictate that she had to remain where she was at least until it was found and she knew there were going to be no repercussions involving Luke. The way winter had set in, that could be some months away, but she could just about bear staying if she didn’t have to lie next to Frederick each night with just a feather bolster separating her from the man she loathed.

All through the last three weeks Polly and Frederick had exchanged no more than monosyllables, so at three o’clock that afternoon, when she had just lit the oil lamps in the kitchen where she and Betsy were baking a batch of bread, she didn’t raise her head from arranging the loaf tins along the fender and covering them with clean cloths as Frederick entered from the hallway.

‘I’m bad.’

‘What?’

‘Bad.
I’ve got the skitters.’ All Frederick’s normal heartiness and patronising manner had been swept away, and the man standing in the doorway looked scared to death.

Polly straightened slowly. She vaguely remembered Frederick using the night closet several times during the night, but such was her exhaustion, she hadn’t been sure if she had just dreamed it when she had awoken in the morning to find him sleeping peacefully on the other side of the bolster. Now, as she looked into her husband’s face – really looked at him for the first time since the night she had staggered into the house wet through and hurting from Arnold’s attack – she thought, He’s got it. I can see it in his face.

‘What am I going to do?’ It was a whimper and could have come from a child rather than a man.

For a moment Polly almost said, ‘Why ask me? You couldn’t wait an extra few minutes for me and because of that I was attacked and raped and murder was done. Don’t ask me what to do because I don’t care,’ but instead she forced herself to say, and calmly, ‘Go to bed, of course.’

‘Get the doctor.’

‘He will do no more than he has done over the last three weeks and you know it, besides which, he will be here at the end of the week as arranged.’

‘Get the doctor!’

‘Don’t shout at me, Frederick.’

It was cold and tight, and for a moment Frederick seemed bereft of speech, but then, possibly because he realised the vulnerable position he was in, he became almost cringing as he said, ‘Please, Polly, please. Get the doctor. I have to see him, I do.’

‘I’ll get Croft to send one of the men in the horse and trap.’ It was abrupt. ‘You know about Herbert Longhurst?’

‘Aye.’ Again the whimper. ‘I was thinking we’d seen the back of it; he said that, didn’t he? The doctor said that.’

‘He was wrong.’ She stared at him and there was a long pause before he turned on his heel and they heard him mounting the stairs at the end of the hall.

‘By, he’s fair petrified, lass.’

Like she had been on that snowy road when she stared into the hot eyes of the man who was going to rape her. Polly turned to look at Betsy, and there was something in the younger woman’s gaze that silenced any further remarks from the housekeeper.

Dr Braithwaite was not best pleased at being called out to Stone Farm on a bitterly cold night that promised more snow, and he made that plain to his colleague from the gentlemen’s club when he said, his tone irritable, ‘This could have waited until morning, Frederick. I wouldn’t have come but for our friendship. Now, I gather you’re worried you have the fever?’

Frederick stared first at the doctor standing by the side of the bed, and then at Polly, who was just inside the bedroom door, and as his eyes slowly returned to the doctor, he said, ‘I have it all right, same as Herbert Longhurst. I thought you said we were over the worst?’

The doctor echoed Polly’s words as he said shortly, ‘I was wrong. Now, you’re in the best place, so just stay there. Boiled water or milk, and keep warm. You’re a big strong man, Frederick, you’ll be all right in time for your Christmas dinner. Now, let’s have a look at you.’

The examination completed, during which time Polly had walked across the room to stare out of the window with her back to the bed, Dr Braithwaite said quietly, ‘Mrs Weatherburn? You’ve been scouring everything as I said?’

‘Yes, I have, Doctor.’

‘And the middens? Have the contents been buried as I suggested?’

Polly turned to look at Frederick; the privies were the men’s province.

‘Aye.’ Frederick nodded. ‘Although . . .’

‘What? Spit it out, man.’

‘Well, the men were tied up with getting the sheep out of the bottom pasture because of the drifts, and you’d said we were over it, so I took the last lot meself to the quarry. The ground’s rock hard for digging.’

‘But Herbert Longhurst was going down with it,’ said Dr Braithwaite sharply.

‘Aye, well, I didn’t know that, did I? The damn fool never said nowt to no one, not even his own daughter.’

‘Did you get any on you?’

‘Just a bit on me boots as it went over and a couple of splashes on me breeches. It really needs two to tip it and there was a bit of a wind.’ And then Frederick’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why? Is that how I got it?’

‘I told you all that you had to be meticulous where the stools were concerned, as well as everything else. For crying out loud, man!’ And then the doctor took a deep breath and his voice was of a soothing quality when he said, ‘Come on, Frederick. Don’t take on. It’ll be all right.’

Only it wasn’t.

The doctor called several times over the next ten days, and although he was consistently bright and cheerful with the patient, his face straightened once he was outside the bedroom. Emily’s father – partly through his own foolishness of trying to carry on when he was so ill, according to the grim-faced doctor – had died within three days, and a distraught Emily was now sharing Betsy’s bed, being unable to face the empty cottage.

On the tenth morning, the doctor took Polly aside once they were downstairs. ‘He’s not doing too well, I’m afraid,’ he said soberly. That was the thing with this disease: it was no respecter of persons, high or low. Inevitably it first broke out in the dismal wilderness of tenemented property in which mean back-to-back houses had little ventilation or light and sanitary conditions were a practical impossibility, but then the thing could spread like wildfire. In the poorer parts of Sunderland and down by the docks in particular, the overcrowding, poverty and consequent ill health made conditions that were ripe for cholera and typhoid, the doctor thought bitterly, and the sailors coming off the boats from foreign parts didn’t make his job any easier. It only needed one with an infectious disease and they were off again. But he’d hoped Frederick’s farm would get off lighter than it had. And now Frederick himself looked to be sinking . . .

Polly stared at the pleasant-faced man in front of her. Was he saying Frederick was dying? People died of typhoid fever, of course they did, but somehow she had never thought it a possibility with her husband. He was fond of boasting he’d never had a day’s illness in his life and had a constitution like a horse, and he’d never known want or hardship either. Good food from a bairn; this lovely home: he’d been cosseted – aye, that was the word all right – cosseted from the day he was born. If little Ellen Croft could fight the disease and win, surely a big robust man like Frederick could? She said as much to the doctor, who shook his head slowly.

‘Doesn’t always work like that, m’dear, and I don’t like this new complication, the vomiting. I’m going to leave you some pepsin and strychnine in tabloid form, and you must keep strictly to the dose, all right?’ They were walking to the front door now, and as Polly opened it, Dr Braithwaite looked out on to the swirling snow and leaden sky, and sighed deeply. ‘Hasn’t let up for a minute, has it,’ he murmured. ‘I nearly couldn’t get through again this morning.’

Polly nodded in reply. She had noticed the doctor had arrived later than was his normal custom when visiting the farm, and that he was on horseback rather than driving his smart horse and trap, and had assumed the roads were bad. The last newspaper the doctor had brought for Frederick had forecast the worst winter for decades.

Betsy joined her at the door as Polly stood watching the doctor walk to his horse, which was tethered in the large cobbled yard beyond the flowerbeds and small stone wall, and as he turned to wave just beyond the wooden gate into the yard and slipped on the cobbles, she said stolidly, ‘Arse over head he’s gone, everywhere’s solid ice.’

They looked at the good doctor scrabbling embarrassedly to his feet, and in spite of the dire circumstances Polly couldn’t repress a smile when Betsy added, ‘Pity Croft’s not long led the bull across to the other barn; I don’t think that dung on the back of his nice coat is going to smell too sweet on the ride back.’

‘Oh, Betsy.’ Polly leaned against the older woman for a moment. Thank God – and she meant that – for Betsy.

‘What’s wrong, lass? An’ I don’t mean all this with the fever an’ all. There’s somethin’ else, isn’t there? You’ve not bin right the last month.’

She didn’t feel as though she would ever be right again but she knew that would pass. Two brothers and yet they couldn’t have been more different, and what she had to keep remembering – and blanking out the rest – was Luke’s gentleness and concern, his overwhelming understanding in the aftermath of Arnold’s brutality. She remained still for a second more, leaning against Betsy’s familiar bulk, and she had to check herself from giving way to the urge to unburden herself. She wanted comfort; she wanted someone to make the last month disappear and for them to be back at the point where Luke had visited the farmhouse and told them Eva was ill. And no one could do that.

‘I’m just exhausted, Betsy, and you must be too.’

Betsy nodded. Whatever it was that was weighing Polly down, she didn’t want to talk about it, but Betsy had always been of a mind that a trouble shared was a trouble halved. She turned to look into the beautiful face next to her in which the deep blue eyes sat like two jewels in a crown, and her voice was uncharacteristically gentle when she said, ‘You know I’m for you, lass? No matter what, I’m for you.’

‘I know that, Betsy,’ said Polly softly. She straightened, squaring her shoulders and stepping back into the hall before shutting the door. ‘I’d better take Frederick some boiled water, it’s all he can keep down at the moment.’

‘Aye, all right, lass.’ You could never tell what went on behind closed doors, but she’d bet her life all this with the lass could be traced back to the man lying upstairs. Had he hit her? Was that it? No, Polly wasn’t the type to stand for that. But whatever it was, it was serious.

Polly took Ruth a drink first, and spent a few minutes talking to her sister, who was now gaining ground rapidly and had got up for an hour or two the night before. And it seemed as if Ruth’s thoughts had moved along a similar vein to Betsy’s, because as Polly rose to leave the room Ruth said quietly, ‘What’s wrong, Poll? There’s something more than Gran and Grandda, isn’t there?’

Polly didn’t answer for a moment. She and Ruth were getting closer by the day and it really did seem as though the fever had purged Ruth clean of her old ways, but – and awful though it was, considering Ruth was her own sister – she didn’t know if she could trust her. And it was Arnold.
Arnold.
Ruth was going to be devastated enough when the body was found without anything more. Her thoughts prompted her to say quietly, ‘I’m all right, Ruth, don’t worry, but I’ve been thinking . . . You haven’t mentioned Arnold at all. Are you missing him?’

She actually found it repugnant to say the name out loud, and as she watched Ruth’s face and the look of surprise that flashed across it she found she was holding her breath.

‘Missing him?’ Ruth clearly hadn’t considered the notion. ‘I haven’t really thought of him, to be honest, not with being so ill and all. But . . . well, no, not really, Poll. It’s . . . well, not like that with him and me, if you know what I mean.’