The Travelling Man (10 page)

‘Too cold for more snow, I reckon.’

There were pieces of stiff sacking covering the carrier’s back and legs. A top hat, green with age, was pulled low over his weathered forehead. He glanced sideways at his passenger, at the small set face, blue with cold, and the hands clutching her bundle as if it had the Crown Jewels wrapped up inside.

‘Cat got your tongue, lass?’

He flicked his whip, urging his horse on faster. Suited him all right her not wanting to talk. He’d only been trying to be kind. It wasn’t as if he was much of a talker himself. His own mother had sworn he was tongue-tied till he was five – even had a go at it herself with the scissors. He began to hum …

Once he’d got this job done he’d go back to working on funerals. This road was a killer in the winter. He sucked his teeth. There were always plenty of funerals at this time of the year. Seemed as if folks decided to last out till Christmas, then just gave up. He hummed a slow march. He was a sight cheaper than the professionals with their fancy carts and their horses plumed like fairies. There was dignity in the way
he
did it. Just a plain box laid with proper reverence on the cart, and the relatives walking behind, decently overcome. There were funerals and funerals, of course. Babies fetched the best price. The outlay for a baby wasn’t all that much for him. Just a hat box for the corpse and his young niece walking in front of the cart with a purple sash on her dress and a wreath of artificial daisies on her head. Yes, the coming months were the best for mortalities. The old and the young – snuffed out like candles the minute the frost began to bite. The outlook was quite cheery really.

‘It might never ’appen, lass,’ he said, neither expecting nor getting any reply.

Annie’s eyes darted from one side of the road to the other. She had no idea how long they’d been travelling, but the ridge of distant hills loomed ever closer. The stony
road
wound uphill now and the horse made a ferocious snorting noise, the breath from its wide nostrils steaming in the freezing air. She had often wondered what it would be like to travel away from the town. There’d been little enough time for walks since her mother died, but she remembered as a child, one clear summer’s day, standing with her mother on a hilltop, looking away from the smoke of the mill chimneys to Pendle Hill in the north, the bump of Boulsworth and the fells leading to the Pennines in the east. ‘Look at the world!’ she’d shouted excitedly, throwing her arms wide. ‘Mam! Look at the world!’

When the carrier stopped the cart to disappear for a minute or so into the bushes, Annie climbed down to stand by the side of the road, waiting for him.

‘You can leave me here,’ she told him. ‘Thank you for the ride.’

The carrier looked at her with suspicion. ‘Nay, lass. I can’t leave you here on the fell road. There’s nowt round here for miles but the odd farmhouse, and mebbe a cottage or two.’ He took off the top hat and scratched a shiny bald head. ‘Look’ere, lass. I know it’s none of my business, but my guess is you’re running away from home.’

‘I’m going into service.’ Annie pointed to a building in the far distance. ‘See that cottage with a lot of black smoke coming out of the chimney? Over there, to the right of that row of trees. Well, that’s where I’m going. The wife’s got bronchitis bad and can’t do the outside work, so they’re taking me on.’ The lie came easily. Annie could actually ‘see’ the farmer’s wife coughing herself sick by the fire, ‘saw’ her husband lead her gently away to her bed, telling her that the girl would be coming that day to take over and ease her pain. ‘It’s very sad. It’s more than likely that she’s consumptive,’ Annie embroidered. ‘I was told her mother went the same way.’

‘Aye, well … as long as I know you’ve a place to
go
to.’ The carrier swung himself back onto the cart. ‘You’ve a fair walk across them fields.’

Annie nodded, raised a hand in salute and stood perfectly still by the side of the road, clutching her bundle, waiting until the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves faded away.

Now she was really alone. Now she could turn her back on the road to the workhouse and walk until she found a farm with plenty of jobs for a strong and willing girl to do. It would be a while yet before her shape gave her secret away and by that time … by that time …

She threw her bundle over a drystone wall, climbed after it and set off across a field with horses standing beneath the bare branches of a spreading tree, their heads lowered against the biting wind. She wouldn’t think about what might happen when the baby showed. That was the future. What mattered was now, and finding shelter before it got dark.

Round about four o’clock when it was time to light the lamps and get the coal in for the night, Edith Morris went round to the Clancys’ house to break the news that her mother had died.

She was finding it hard to understand why Annie hadn’t been round to pay her respects. Nextdoor had made a lovely job of laying her mother out, sliding her on to a board to keep her straight, putting pennies on her eyes and crossing her hands over a nightdress with a pin-tucked bodice. Young Annie had thought such a lot about her Grandma Morris – it really was a mystery why she hadn’t been. Edith knocked at the Clancys’ front door.

It was immediately obvious that Jack Clancy’s new wife had no intention of asking Edith in.

‘Annie? You’re asking after Annie?’ She lifted a pendulous breast and had a good scratch. ‘She’s gone away and she won’t be coming back, not if she knows what’s good for her.’

‘Hold on a minute!’

Edith took a step forward, just too late to prevent the door being slammed hard against her. For a long moment she stood irresolute on the pavement, chewing on her thin lips till they almost disappeared, holding her head up as if she scented the sounds of battle in the air.

Edith Morris had just spent the worst forty-eight hours of her life. Not one tear had she shed in front of the neighbours crowding into the little front room to pay their last respects to the old woman who could be trusted to keep her mouth shut, no matter what tempting secrets they confided in her. Edith’s eyes might be dry, but inside her she was weeping tears of blood. What would she do with her life now her mother was dead? Who would
need
her now? She was too distraught to look even a day ahead.

‘Where’s young Annie gone? That’s all I want to know. Where, in the name of God, has she gone?’ She burst into the Clancy house like a tornado, eyes flashing.

Florrie was flabbergasted. You could have knocked her down with a feather, as she told Jack later on when he came up from the mine.

‘I don’t remember asking you in, Miss Morris!’ She could only stand there gaping at the scrawny-necked woman, with eyes bulging from their sockets like shiny marbles. Gone clean off her chump, by the look of her.

‘Annie was pregnant. Mother and me guessed,’ Edith said straight out. This wasn’t the time nor the place for fancy words. ‘Pregnant!’ she said again. Overcome by too much emotion she put a hand out to the table for support. ‘Just tell me where she’s gone and I’ll find her – go after her and bring her back.’ The shiny eyes rolled wildly. ‘I’ll look after her. She can live with me. I’ll help her bring her baby up. The Lord giveth even as He taketh away. Don’t you see? My mother is dead, but Annie will bring new life into my house. It is the will of God. He has made His purpose clear.’

‘Best thing you can do, chuck, is go home and have a bit of a lie down.’ Florrie mentally crossed herself. It was
funny
how religion turned some folks’ heads. Couldn’t this potty woman see that bringing Annie back to the street was out of the question? She could just imagine Jack’s reaction to the news that his daughter was moving back with her shame. ‘Don’t take on, chuck,’ she soothed, coming round the table and taking Edith by the elbow. ‘I’ll come back with you to your house and have a look at your mother, and as soon as we hear from Annie I’ll let you know.’

‘You promise?’ Edith’s anguish had gone straight to her neck as usual, flushing it up like a scald.

‘On my honour, chuck. On
God
’s honour,’ Florrie soothed, feeling that would carry more weight.

‘She’s a sight for sore eyes,’ she said, crossing herself as she stared at the corpse. ‘Have you touched her up yourself, or did you have the Co-op in to do it?’

‘Where’s our Annie gone?’

The boys were getting their teas down as fast as they could so they could join their mates round the lamp on the corner of the spare land. Two of the miners on the early shift were due there to play a game of marbles for higher stakes than had been known for many a day. Threepence a hit was rumoured, and some said it was as high as sixpence. Eddie could hardly wait for the excitement to begin; he could almost hear the iron bobbers pinging against each other. One thing about the teas his new mother made: you could eat them standing up if you wanted. They never varied much. Thick slices of bread with jam in between them; sometimes potted meat. And shop meatpies followed by pineapple chunks on a Saturday, when she was flush.

‘Annie’s gone working away.’ Florrie was passing round half-pint pots of strong sweet tea. ‘Maid to a Duchess, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘When will she be coming back?’ John’s mouth drooped. ‘Why didn’t she tell us she was going?’

Florrie ruffled his hair. ‘Because she was called to go sudden, chuck, that’s why.’

‘Can you show me on the map where she’s gone?’ Timmy went to the shelf for his beloved atlas. ‘Is it as far away as Scotland?’

‘Ask your dad. He’ll be in any minute now.’

But there was no time for that. Not with the game due to start any minute, not with stakes as high as was rumoured. When Jack Clancy came through the door, a black bent figure wearing old clothes and heavy clogs, his wife was frying four lamb chops, two for him and two for her, her fat rear swaying from side to side as she turned the meat over and over in the hot fat.

Annie was long past feeling hungry. She just kept on going, placing one foot in front of the other, with no real idea of her whereabouts. She had accepted of course that there
was
a world outside the town where she’d lived all her life, but had never once asserted her right to explore it. Now, after two miles of steady walking, her boots were rubbing blisters up on her heels, making every step a burning agony. The wind blew flurries of frozen rain into her face, pricking as sharp as needle jabs.

The sky looked dark and swollen, a much bigger sky, Annie was sure, than the sky she’d left behind. She seemed to be walking into nowhere, up a muddy lane flanked by drystone walls, with no sign that anyone had lived there, ever. A mile further on the walls petered out at a derelict cottage, open to the sky, and she knew she was lost, knew that when it was properly dark she would have no idea in which direction she was walking.

She remembered how during the spell of bad weather before Christmas, a woman in the next street had wandered out from the town, crazed in her mind after her baby was born dead. How she’d been found, frozen stiff, her features set in a horrific mask, her mouth wide open as if she’d cried out for help right to the last. Quite dispassionately Annie wondered how long it
would
take for her own body to set hard as a rock. Two hours? Four? And would it hurt, or would she merely drop off to sleep, then wake up dead?

Sitting herself down on the ruins of a low wall she gingerly eased a foot out of a boot. What she saw made the tears spring to her eyes. The blister had burst, and the black wool of her stocking was sticking to it in a patch of wet blood. The sensible thing to do, the right thing to do would be to walk back to the top road. At least she’d get somewhere that way. Here was the middle of nowhere, the ‘back of beyond’, as Grandma Morris used to say about her nephew who had gone to live in the village of Whalley. ‘Burying himself and his new bride alive,’ she’d said.

It was funny how the old lady kept popping into her mind. It was because she hadn’t gone in to say goodbye, Annie decided.

Closing her eyes against the agony, she eased her foot back into her boot. By now, if she’d done as she was told, she could be inside the workhouse, sitting at a long table with rows of tramp women in white caps, eating pobs out of wooden bowls, being silently grateful for every single mouthful they took.

Grandma Morris would have understood that the workhouse was an unthinkable solution. She was forever saying that she had never been beholden to nobody – even though Edith waited on her hand and foot. Edith would think Annie had got what was coming to her for being so wicked as to lie with a man before she was married. Annie stood up, pulled her cloak closer round her throat and took a painful step forward.

By now it was almost dark and the skyline was so bleak and hopeless Annie felt like lifting up her face and howling her misery at it. Soft yellow lamplight shone from the windows of a row of cottages, but she limped on by. It was the big houses she must make for, the mill and pit owners’ mansions, where they would be glad of
an
extra pair of hands. The long twilight seemed to be never ending, as she stumbled, head down, staggering from side to side of a deeply rutted cart-track.

When the horse appeared suddenly round the bend of the road she was too late to dive for the ditch on her left. In her dark cloak, with her head down, she was practically invisible, but as the horse reared up its rider had a split-second view of her face, eyes wide with terror, mouth open in a soundless scream.

As she fell, he jerked hard on the reins, his reaction as swift as was humanly possible, but just too late to prevent his startled horse kicking out as it struggled frantically to regain its footing.

Seth Armstrong slid from his saddle to bend over what he took to be an old woman of the roads. With fingers grown skilled at tending animals, he examined the crumpled figure as well as he could beneath the cloak and the layers of clothing, relieved when his hands came away unbloodied. The tramp woman was alive, thank God, though deeply insensible. As he lifted her easily into his arms, her head lolled back, her face an indefinable blur in the darkness.