The Tale of Holly How (6 page)

7

Word Gets Around

Naturally, the news of Dr. Gainwell’s candidacy for the position of head teacher did not remain a secret for very long. Fifteen minutes before Bertha Stubbs was making her unwelcome announcement to Margaret and Annie Nash, Elsa Grape was passing the news along to Grace Lythecoe, the widow of the former vicar, whom she met on the street just outside the door of Rose Cottage. From inside the cottage came the vibrant sound of Caruso, Mrs. Lythecoe’s canary, warbling a series of complicated trills up and down the scale. Elsa knew, of course, that Grace Lythecoe, having been the wife of a vicar, was not one to gossip, but she was the first person Elsa encountered, so she was the first to hear Elsa’s news.

“I’m sorry that her ladyship has seen fit to intervene in the selection process,” Mrs. Lythecoe said gravely. “And I very much hope, Elsa, that you will keep this information to yourself. The school trustees will have a difficult enough time dealing with the facts of this matter without having to deal with the inevitable gossip, as well. I’m sure you don’t want to cause them any more anxiety than necessary, do you?”

“Oh, no, Mrs. Lythecoe,” Elsa vowed, her eyes widening. “Of course not, Mrs. Lythecoe.”

And then, without hesitation, Elsa hurried to the Tower Bank Arms, the village pub, which sat on a hill on the opposite side of the main road through the village. There, she went looking for her friend Mrs. Barrow, the wife of the pub’s proprietor. She found her in the grassy garden behind the Arms, folding freshly dried bed sheets from the clothesline into a wicker laundry basket, and told her story.

Frances Barrow listened with a growing apprehension, and was much distressed by the implications of Elsa’s report. She hurried into the pub to inform her husband, who had just brought up a fresh keg of beer from the cellar and was tapping the bung, that Miss Nash would not be the new head teacher, after all. Lady Longford had just overruled the trustees’ appointment and awarded the position to her own man, a Dr. Harrison Gainwell, a missionary from Borneo. Mrs. Barrow was highly incensed at her ladyship’s intervention in school affairs, since her very own Margaret had just been promoted to the junior class, which her mother had expected would be taught by Miss Nash.

It did not much matter to Mr. Barrow who taught his daughter, as long as the girl learnt her lessons and behaved herself, but he quite naturally believed that this news might be of some interest to the other parents in the village. So that evening, when the men began to gather at the Arms for their nightly half-pints and the monthly dart tournament (which always drew a much larger than usual crowd), he mentioned it to three or four of the early arrivals, who mentioned it to those who came later, and so on. Of course, there was always a great deal of noise in the pub, singing and shouting and clinking of glasses and such, and it wasn’t always possible to hear exactly what was being said. But by closing time, most of the dart players in both Near and Far Sawrey—that would be at least half of the men in the twin villages—had heard the facts of the matter, at least in a general way. They knew that a gentleman of outstanding education, character, and amazing courage (they were a little unclear as to whether his name was Gainfellow or Galsworth) had been unanimously appointed by the school trustees to take over Sawrey School, his entire salary being underwritten by Lady Longford out of gratitude for his having rescued the three children of a fellow missionary from the cooking pot of a savage tribe of head hunters.

It was this thrilling tale that the wives of the village learnt from their husbands at breakfast, and which they shared amongst themselves, with further embellishments, as they met one another in the street or the post office or the village shop or across the garden fence. And since the village women cared little about Dr. Gainfellow’s adventures in Borneo and a great deal more about the fate of dear Miss Nash, they were soon speculating sympathetically about what would become of her.

Most of the speculators felt that she would stay on as the faithful teacher of the infants class, as she had for the last nine years, whilst others believed that she would suffer such a humiliating loss of face that she could never stay in the village and would most certainly be forced to look for another teaching position. In fact, Bertha Stubbs (who met several of the women in the queue at the post office a little before lunch time) reported having seen Miss Nash in her back garden early that morning, airing several valises and looking terribly upset. It was clear that the two sisters were packing to leave.

Having heard this intriguing bit about the valises, Agnes Llewellyn’s daughter Mary wondered out loud to Lydia Dowling’s niece Gladys just how quickly the Nash sisters’ cottage would be let—if they actually moved house, of course, although perhaps they wouldn’t, since Annie had been so ill all spring. Gladys, in her turn, met Hannah Braithwaite, wife of the village constable, and happened to mention that it looked as if the Nash sisters might go to the south of England, with the hope of a new position for Miss Nash and a kinder climate for Annie, who suffered so with her lungs.

Hannah became very excited when she heard this bit of news, because Miss Nash’s cottage was larger and nicer than Croftend, where she and the constable and their three children lived, cheek by jowl, as it were, in only two small bedrooms. It had a much larger garden, too, with room for a pig and chickens, which would mean eggs and bacon. Not to hurry things along, of course, and Hannah certainly didn’t wish the Nash sisters any ill luck, the good Lord forbid. But she did so hope that once the cottage was empty, she and Constable Braithwaite could obtain it. Who better to have it than the village constable?

Except, as Mathilda Crook pointed out when she heard of Hannah’s hopes, the Nash cottage would very likely go to Dr. Gainfellow (or Galsworth—some had heard one name and some the other), who would necessarily be looking for a place to live. And since he was a bachelor (no one knew this for certain, of course, but a missionary to Borneo couldn’t possibly have a wife, could he?), he would certainly make a handy fourth at bridge and fill in the gap at the table when Captain and Miss Woodcock entertained.

And speaking of Miss Woodcock, who had thus far fended off several highly suitable offers of courtship (to the village’s great distress), would it not be delightful if she and the new head teacher would strike up a romantic friendship, fall in love, and marry? After all, Miss Woodcock—whose brother might decide at any moment to take a wife who would displace her who would have to find a new home in which to live out her spinsterhood and a lonely old age—was seriously in want of a husband, and a former missionary from Borneo would be a perfect choice.

So it was that by the time the mothers finished their Tuesday baskets of ironing and called in the children for their lunches, Sawrey School not only had a new head teacher, but Miss Nash and her sister had up sticks and gone to the south of England, leaving their cottage to the Braithwaites or to Dr. Worthwell, who was to marry dear Miss Woodcock.

As most people know, in a village, word gets around very fast.

8

An Unfortunate Accident

Beatrix didn’t hear a word of this gossip, for she had spent the morning at Hill Top, happily making pencil sketches for
The Tale of Tom Kitten
. She had borrowed a kitten from one of the stone masons, and drew a few pictures of it, although it was a mischievous little creature and not very anxious to sit still. Then she went inside and made some preliminary sketches of the kitchen and bedroom for the interior scenes. She had already written out the tale in a penny exercise book and calculated that she’d need a couple of dozen paintings to illustrate it. She was hoping to finish the project within the next few months, and was already thinking ahead to the next book, which she had decided would be a story about the rats that seemed to be everywhere, and into everything.

Making the indoor sketches was not as pleasant as it might have been. Beatrix very much enjoyed going into the house whenever she got the chance, but Mrs. Jennings—who had never been enthusiastic about staying on at Hill Top Farm after Beatrix took possession—always made her feel uncomfortable, as if she were intruding. And when she did go in, she couldn’t help noticing that the place needed a good airing and cleaning, top to bottom, something that was understandably hard for Mrs. Jennings to do, with two small children and a new baby to care for. And then there was Mrs. Jennings’s cheap machine-made furniture and religious pictures and bric-a-brac, which made the old rooms look cluttered and shabby.

Beatrix could hardly wait until the new extension was finished and the Jenningses had moved into it, and the main part of the house was her very own. She would furnish the rooms with authentic antiques that would fit the spirit of the old house, and she already was happily looking for the curtains and rugs, the dishes and fireplace implements and pictures that would make Hill Top her home. Her very first home—in spite of the fact that she wouldn’t be able to live there the year round, as she desperately longed to do.

So, all things considered, Beatrix was just as glad when Mrs. Jennings didn’t ask her to stay to lunch. She went back to Belle Green and ate a sandwich and a bowl of soup. A little while later, Mr. Jennings brought the pony cart—pulled by Winston, a shaggy brown pony with an alert, self-confident air—to collect her for their drive to Holly How Farm, to have a look at the sheep she had bought.

The Crooks’ dog Rascal trotted out to the cart with her. A fawn-colored Jack Russell terrier, he lived at Belle Green but counted the village as his home-at-large. And since she boarded at Belle Green when she came to the village, he seemed to have appointed himself as her escort.

“I’d like to go along,”
said Rascal politely, giving her fingers a lick to show his respect.

“Do you mind if we take the Crooks’ dog?” Beatrix asked. “I think he’d like to go with us.”

The farmer grinned. “’Spose if I said no, he’d just trot along behind. Jump in, Rascal.”

The narrow track of Stony Lane glistened in the afternoon sunlight as they drove along. The thick green hedge was filigreed with the delicate tracery of honeysuckle and blackberry and veiled with feathery plumes of travelers’ joy, whilst beyond the hedge, the green bracken climbed the shoulder of the hill. The little road snaked upward and out of the village and draped itself across the slope of Oatmeal Crag, above the emerald green water meadows on either side of Wilfin Beck, dotted with the plump white shapes of grazing sheep. Beyond lay a stubble-field where the men and their massive draft horses had just finished cutting the summer’s hay, the haystacks as golden and proud as temples in some exotic land. It had been a dry, hot summer thus far, the best kind of weather for haying, so most of the hay had been cut and stacked. The next regular farm chore, sheep-shearing, would begin in another week or so.

With Rascal on the seat beside her, every now and then giving her chin a quick lick, Beatrix looked around with pleasure. She had loved the countryside since her earliest childhood, when her family went to Scotland for their summer-long holiday. Then, nothing was sweeter than a long walk through the meadows and woods, listening to the wind through the fir trees and watching for a glimpse of the fairies that came out at night to dance on the green turf. Now, she loved to walk up Stony Lane to sketch at Moss Eccles Tarn, the small lake behind Oatmeal Crag. And she enjoyed riding through the countryside with Mr. Jennings, for he had farmed in this area for quite some time and was usually willing to share what he knew about the land and the people. When she first met the farmer, he seemed taciturn and withdrawn, but now that they were better acquainted, he was proving a regular gossip, and much friendlier than his wife.

Just now, he pointed with his pony whip at a tall, frowning house that stood well off to their right, on the other side of Wilfin Beck. It was built of gray stone, with a gray slate roof and narrow windows that gleamed like steel in the afternoon light. A fortress, grim and uncompromising, it was half-screened by gloomy fir trees, and behind it rose the dark wildness of Cuckoo Brow Wood.

“Tidmarsh Manor,” Mr. Jennings remarked. “Sad place, that.”

“Sad?”
Rascal asked. He shivered and moved closer to Miss Potter on the seat.
“I call it sinister.”

“Why so?” Beatrix inquired encouragingly.

“Why sinister? Because Dudley—Lady Longford’s spaniel—says there’s trouble brewing.”
Rascal looked up at Miss Potter, whose pink cheeks were even pinker with the heat.
“Dudley is fat and rude and nobody much likes him. But he knows what’s going on at the Manor.”

“If tha doan’t hush thi noise, Rascal,” Mr. Jennings said sternly, “tha can’st get down and walk.” To Beatrix he replied, “ ’Tis sad because Lady Longford’s husband died, and her son—t’ young Lord Longford—went off to New Zealand and bought a sheep station.”

“Really,” Beatrix remarked with interest, remembering that Dimity Woodcock had named Lady Longford as the person who had nominated a candidate for the school.

“Oh, aye. Great pity, ’twas.” Mr. Jennings pulled his brows together and pursed his lips. “Lady Longford had it in mind that t’ lad would marry t’ Kittredge daughter and take over t’ estate, which by rights he should’ve done, o’course.” He flicked a fly off Winston’s shoulder with a light touch of the whip. “But he didn’t like t’ girl, ’spite of t’ fact that t’ lands join, and raised a great protest against t’ marriage. His mother told him to go away and ne’er come back. So he ran off to New Zealand and married a sheep farmer’s daughter, and then got killed in a t’rrible train crash, and now there’s no one to keep t’ fam’ly line goin’ or manage t’ Tidmarsh estate.” Mr. Jennings concluded his speech with the satisfied air of a man who has managed to pack a great many complicated details into one brief narrative.

Beatrix flinched as if she had been touched by Mr. Jennings’s whip, for the story was rather too near her own. “Oh, dear,” she murmured, thinking that parents could be extraordinarily cruel when it came to managing their children’s lives. It did no good and caused nothing but pain, all round.

“There’s the granddaughter,”
Rascal pointed out.
“Of course, she’s half a New Zealander, Dudley says, which is the reason the old lady turns up her nose.”

“There would be somebody to inherit,” Mr. Jennings went on, “if Lady Longford would have her, but she won’t. T’ son had a daughter, y’ see. Now t’ girl’s father is dead and her mother, too. She’s stayin’ at t’ Manor, sin’ she has nowheres else to go. Caroline, she’s called.”

Caroline. It was the name of Beatrix’s favorite cousin, Caroline Hutton. She cast a glance back over her shoulder at the house, which stood gaunt and forbidding behind the firs, with an air of desolate isolation.

“It looks a lonely place for a child,” she remarked, feeling an immediate sympathy for the girl who was exiled there.

Perhaps because she herself had not had playmates in the usual way, Beatrix was not very comfortable with the village youngsters who tormented the ducks and chased cats and stole birds’ eggs. She was much more at ease with quieter children, especially with girls who enjoyed books and art—girls like herself, when she was younger. Now, she thought of how she would have felt if she had been shut up in that dark, menacing house, and shivered. If Caroline Longford was timid and impressionable, she might well be terrified, especially when the wind whistled down the chimneys and battered at the windows.

“Lonely? Oh, aye,” Mr. Jennings agreed. “Nobody on t’ place but a housemaid or two and t’ Beevers—Mrs. Beever cooks, Beever keeps t’ garden and drives t’ phaeton when it’s wanted. And there’s t’ companion to Lady Tidmarsh. Miss Martine. She’s giving t’ girl her lessons ’til she goes off to school.”

“The child needs an animal to keep her company,” Beatrix said decidedly.

As children, she and her younger brother Bertram had kept all sorts of animals in their third-floor nursery at Bolton Gardens, frogs and lizards and snakes and mice and even a bat and an obstreperous raven. Over the years, her pets—Punch, her frog; the splendid Belgian rabbit she called Peter Piper; and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, a dear little hedgehog who had died quietly just a few months ago—had become even more important to her. They had served as models for the drawings she used in her little books and had gone everywhere with her. On this trip, for instance, she had brought her pet rabbits and mouse, as well as a guinea pig named Tuppenny, about whom she wanted to make a story. In fact, she had already written it out some two years before, calling it
The Tale of Tuppenny
. But she had decided instead to do the Kitten book, set at Hill Top Farm. If Lady Longford’s granddaughter would like to borrow her guinea pig—

“Don’t think so,”
Rascal said confidentially, into her ear.
“Dudley says that Miss Martine doesn’t approve of—”

“Doubt she’d be allowed, Miss Potter,” Mr. Jennings said.

Beatrix frowned. Not allowed to have animals? That would be a hard thing, and a lonely life, indeed.

“Talkin’ of animals,” Mr. Jennings said, pointing again, “dust tha’ see t’ top of Holly How? Up there is a very old badger sett, older’n any others between t’ lakes, some say. Doan’t know how many badgers live there, but it’s home to rabbits, and likely a fox or two. Most of t’ setts between t’ lakes has been dug, some of ’em dug more’n once. But Lord Longford ’ud nivver let anybody meddle with t’ sett on Holly How, and auld Ben has carried on t’ way his lordship wanted. So there’s badgers there, I expect.”

Beatrix looked where the farmer was pointing, at a rocky hill outlined against the sky. She had studied and sketched quite a few wild creatures, but not badgers, who were nocturnal animals and quite shy. “The only badger I’ve ever seen,” she said thoughtfully, “was a very old, very fat badger in a traveling circus. I felt rather sorry for him. They’re not much liked by farmers, I understand.”

“Some say they eat chicks and eggs in t’ hen coop,” Mr. Jennings replied, “but them ’re mostly careless folk who don’t shut up their chickens proper.” He paused, frowning. “Somebody dug t’ sett down by t’ Hill Top rock quarry a few days ago. Badger-baiters, most like. There’s some in this village that doan’t mind takin’ a chance on a fight ’twixt a badger and a dog.”

Rascal growled deep in his throat. His father had been tossed into a badger pit once, and although a stalwart warrior, had barely lived to tell the tale. Badgers were known as stout fighters who employed both tooth and claw—and they had long, sharp claws—against their foes. He himself was brave, but he should not like to go up against one.

“But the law prohibits badger-baiting,” Beatrix replied with a frown, not sure whether she felt sorrier for the badger or for the dog. “Not to mention that the diggers were trespassing on Hill Top property.” And that made the badgers
her
badgers, didn’t it? Not really, of course, since one couldn’t own a wild animal. But the idea that somebody would steal a peaceable animal out of its home made her angry and indignant.

“Did t’ law ever stop anybody who wanted to do a thing?” Mr. Jennings remarked with such scorn that Beatrix felt that her response had been naïve. Perhaps the village constable wasn’t interested in enforcing a law that protected animals. And as far as trespassing went, many of the poorer people in the district gathered berries and mushrooms wherever they could be found, and shot hares and rabbits and pheasants for their dinner tables. Who was to draw the line between poaching a rabbit for a meal and digging a badger for entertainment?

They went along a little way in silence, until the road crested the steep shoulder of Oatmeal Crag and began to creep cautiously down into the valley. They crossed Wilfin Beck at a stony ford where small fish flashed like quicksilver in the shallow water, and drove along a well-used cart-track toward a cottage, its whitewashed walls topped by a roof of gray Coniston slates. The front of the house was covered with pink roses, and there was a blue door.

“Holly How Farm,” Mr. Jennings said, as they drove down the track. “Hornby’ll be waitin’ for us. He’s glad to sell us those sheep.”