The Travelling Man (11 page)

Turning the horse he set off for home, holding Annie and her pathetic little bundle in front of him. He urged the horse on, upwards towards the hills, then across a narrow path hung over with the bare branches of trees, his horse treading the familiar path by instinct.

‘Mrs Martindale?
Mrs Martindale
?’

Seth was calling out before it was even faintly possible that she could hear him, but his housekeeper was there in the front room of the old stone-built house; he could see her moving about lighting the lamps, coming over to the window to draw the long velvet curtains.

‘Mrs Martindale!’ The woman was more deaf than she would admit to, and it was Biddy’s afternoon off though time she was back. Seth led the horse right up to the glassed-in porch and dismounted.

From round the back of the house Biddy Baker disentangled herself from her current sweetheart’s arms. Quickly she adjusted her clothing, ramming her felt hat down over ruffled hair.

‘What’s he yammering on about? It’s no use him shouting his head off. Old Ma Martindale wouldn’t hear him if he fired a starting-pistol up her nose. I’d best go before he splits his tonsils.’

By the time she got there Seth was lifting what looked like a dead woman down from his horse.

‘The door, Biddy!’ he shouted. ‘The door …’

Biddy thought the animal doctor looked terrible, and by the expression on Mrs Martindale’s face as she came out of the parlour, she thought so too.

‘The lamp, Biddy!’ she cried, all of a twitter. ‘Hold it high so the master can see where he’s going.’

‘Nay, sir,’ she protested, when he kicked the door of his own room open, ‘you can’t put her in there.’ She bustled up to the bed. ‘She’s a tramp woman, sir. The spare room’s where she belongs. Just look at the dirt from her boots on my nice clean spread.’ She glared at Biddy as if it was all her fault. ‘You should have called
me
, sir. I was drawing the parlour curtains or I’d have seen you.’

Seth didn’t bother to turn round. ‘Put the lamp down there, Biddy, and I think we’ll have the candles lit as well. I’m going to need all the light I can get.’

‘
I’ll
see to them, sir.’ Mrs Martindale almost snatched the box of matches out of Biddy’s hand.

‘I couldn’t avoid her …’ Seth pulled the scarf and the flat cap from Annie’s head, releasing the long fall of her hair. ‘Good God, she’s only a child! I was sure she was a vagrant making for the nearest barn.’ He started to unfasten the clasp at the top of the black cloak, his hand cold against Annie’s throat. ‘Let’s see what damage is done.’

At once Annie opened her eyes, saw the face of a strange man bending over her, and moaning, tried to twist away from him.

‘Best leave her to me, sir.’

Nellie Martindale didn’t know what to do for the best. She was so overcome with embarrassment she could hardly speak. Surely the master could see it was a young woman he was undressing and not a child? And that silly Biddy was having a bit of a cough to disguise the fact that she was laughing her head off. It was all right the master running his hands over an injured animal, keeping his fingers clear of bared teeth, reaching for his phial of chloroform, whispering in that special voice of his that even animals seemed to understand. But this was a different kettle of fish altogether. She moved to the bed as Seth slid the girl’s cloak away, before making a determined start on her blouse buttons.

‘Nay, sir.’ Forgetting her place for once, Nellie actually tried to push him aside. ‘Let me do that. See, she’s gone over again, the poor soul. You just leave this to me.’

‘Hot water, Mrs Martindale. Towels. And my box from downstairs!’

Nellie moved away. She knew that tone of voice. One word from the master when he was in that mood and you jumped to it. Quick!

‘Come with me, Biddy.’ She marched straight-backed towards the door.

Seth’s voice was a whisper, but it seemed to come at them like a pistol shot. ‘Stay where you are, Biddy!’ He continued undressing Annie. ‘I might need you to hold up the lamp when I’ve got all her clothes off.’

Nellie Martindale could hardly stop her legs from dithering, she was that upset. Dismissing her as if she was nothing but a maid of all work! Speaking to her like that in front of Biddy! Calmly stripping that ragamuffin. Slipping her blouse down, whipping her skirts away. It was disgusting!

Downstairs in the stone-flagged kitchen, tut-tutting to herself, Nellie took a cross-stitched holder down from its nail and lifted the kettle from the hob. She poured
a
stream of hot water into a bowl, added cold from the tap at the wide slopstone, then still chunnering snatched three towels down from the airing-string above the fireplace.

Nellie Martindale looked far older than a woman in her early sixties had any right to look. Her hair, screwed up on top of her head in a sparse bun, was the dirty grey of well-trodden snow. Long, long ago she had married a dashing soldier who had failed to tell her that he was a deserter trying to avoid being shipped to India. The union had hardly been consummated when two detectives had burst into the room to snatch Nellie’s bridegroom from her arms. Three weeks later he had been shot at point-blank range when the military, hounding him through a wood, mistook the branch in his hand for a gun.

From that day Nellie had never glanced at any man in what she would have described to herself as ‘that way’. She was saving herself, she told Biddy, for when they met again in heaven, where they would carry on where they had left off.

Exactly
where they’d left off? Biddy found the notion fascinating.

Nellie started for the stairs. It should have been her and not Biddy up there in the master’s room. Mr Armstrong might be the best animal doctor for miles around, but that didn’t make him into a proper doctor used to dealing with people. Only last week Nellie had seen him splinting a wild cat’s leg, holding the spitting and snarling creature still, talking to it in that special way he had. But this wasn’t the same, not at all the same.

The doctor should have been sent for, though Nellie didn’t have much time for doctors, either. One had wanted to examine her once when she had told him about a pain in her side, but she’d given him short shrift. ‘Make me a rubbing bottle up. I’ll get it right myself,’ she’d told him, and though the house reeked of wintergreen for three weeks the pain disappeared, never to return.

She stood still on the bend in the wide stairs. When the master had untied the young lass’s skirt, hadn’t there been a soft swell of her belly? And what about the blue veins on the full breasts? Nellie gripped the bowl so hard the water sloshed up the side.

‘Nay … never …’ she said aloud.

The girl before Biddy had kept her shame a secret for months till the day Nellie had gone into her room without knocking and caught her stark naked, staring at her reflection in the wardrobe mirror.

Nellie’s small head moved from side to side as the certainty grew on her. There was no wedding ring, but then there wouldn’t be, would there? Nellie forced herself to continue her way upstairs. The workhouse was the right and the only place for fallen girls, and that was where this one would go as soon as she was fit to stand. She, Nellie Martindale, would see to that personally.

Annie lay perfectly flat in the high bed watching the firelight flickering on the flowered wallpaper. She was dreaming. No, she was awake. She closed her eyes and remembered walking, head bent, along a narrow lane. There was a gale tearing the breath from her body, sending hard shafts of frozen rain at her, blinding her, so that when the horse came straight at her she was conscious only of a huge black shape towering over her, blotting out the sky.

She sat up, held out her arms and saw she was wearing a nightdress so shrunk in the wash that the sleeves ended six inches from her wrists. There was a pain down her side and a nauseating throbbing in her head.

‘So you’ve come to, then?’

The girl sitting in a shadowed corner of the room came towards the bed smiling. The first thing Annie noticed about her was the roundness of her face. Pert and pretty, she had an upturned nose and a cloud of fly-away brown hair, topped by a shrivel of a lace cap.

‘You mustn’t get bothered,’ she was saying. ‘Mr
Armstrong
says there’s nothing broken, though you’re going to be black and blue tomorrow. It was his horse what kicked you.’

Annie closed her eyes as the ceiling dipped and swayed towards her, but then the feeling of sinking down through the bed was worse. There was a scorching pain in her side and a dragging ache in the small of her back. When she opened her eyes again the brown-haired girl was leaning over her, speaking in a hoarse whisper.

‘Were you running away?’

Annie bit her lip. ‘Running away from the workhouse, really. I was looking for a place to work.’

‘This isn’t a big house,’ Biddy said, as quickly as if she’d read Annie’s mind. ‘There’s only me and the housekeeper.’ The round eyes narrowed. ‘She nearly fainted dead away when Mr Armstrong whipped all your clothes off.’

Annie tried to sit up. ‘My clothes? My bundle?’ She swung her legs over the side of the bed, stood up – and gave a soft little cry as the floor came up and hit her smack between the eyes.

There was a man standing by the side of her bed when she surfaced once again – a powerfully-built giant of a man, with an abundance of silver-fair hair and a wind-brown face. His eyes were filled with genuine concern.

‘How are you feeling now?’

Annie turned her head towards the window. Surely the last time she’d looked out the curtains had been drawn against the night, and a girl with brown curly hair had talked to her. Now it was light, and huge flakes of snow fell silently, straight down, like a beaded curtain.

‘I’d best get up.’ She raised herself on an elbow, only to feel a firm hand on her shoulder.

‘You’ll stay where you are.’ The big man walked to the door. ‘That snow’s not pretending.’

‘But I’ve got to get on my way!’ Annie could hear herself becoming agitated. The dizziness had almost
gone
, the throbbing in her head was less acute, but the soreness down her side and the ache in her back were worse. ‘I’ve got to find a place before the snow starts to stick.’

Seth turned, a hand on the brass door handle. Already the snow was a spread blanket, merging the fields and the paths into one. His calls would have to be made on foot and he would have to go now to get back before dark. The girl seemed comfortable enough and the swelling on her forehead was going down a little. He’d ask Biddy to make sure to keep the fire going, and he’d ask Mrs Martindale to make one of her milk jellies. He felt impatient to be away, and yet responsible for the girl being here at all.

‘The least I can do is keep you here till you’re fit to leave.’ He opened the door wide. ‘Is there any family fretting about where you’ve got to? Anybody expecting you?’

‘Nobody fretting and nobody expecting,’ Annie told him.

‘I see …’ He nodded, his mind seemingly on other more important things. ‘I see.’

Then he was gone, his heavy boots clattering down the stairs. Annie heard him calling out as he left the house, giving orders in a deep voice, slamming a door behind him.

Biddy wondered what Mrs Martindale would do if she found out that the girl upstairs was expecting. She doubted if the old bat would be making her a milk jelly, measuring out the gelatine, the tip of her tongue poking out between her thin lips. But Biddy had realised a long time ago that what Mr Armstrong said was gospel where his housekeeper was concerned. If he’d asked her to sit on the fire she’d have done so. When he spoke Biddy noticed she gave a little bob, not quite a curtsey, but as near as damn it. Mrs Martindale had been trained donkey’s years ago in a big house teeming with servants, a little cog in a big wheel, Biddy suspected. Now she
was
a big cog in a little wheel, with just one underling to boss about.

‘Annie Clancy,’ she was saying now. ‘That’s what she says her name is.’ The milk was poured grudgingly into the gelatine. ‘Wouldn’t you say Clancy was Irish, Biddy?’

‘Not Welsh, Mrs Martindale.’

‘And if Irish, it’s ten to one the girl’s an R.C.’

‘Beholden to the Pope,’ said Biddy, in the mood for stirring things up.

‘Having children for His Holiness. Dozens and dozens of them so that one day they take us all over.’

‘An English Pope on our throne.’

‘She’ll have to go,’ said Mrs Martindale, stirring so vigorously that the milk slopped up and spattered the scrubbed table.

By nightfall there was no sign of Seth. A blizzard had blown up, shifting the thick powdered snow into dunes, rippling it away as far as the eye could see. Biddy’s sweetheart had failed to appear at their arranged time and Biddy, growing tired of him and of all the panting and struggling for the virtue she had no intention of relinquishing, told herself she didn’t give a tuppenny damn.

Mrs Martindale had done what she’d been told to do for Annie, and not a thing more. So it was left to Biddy to carry the slops, make the fire up in the spare room’s tiny grate, help Annie along the landing to it, and wrap a hot brick in a blanket for the bed, shoving it in at the bottom and telling Annie to get her feet on it and be blowed to chilblains.

‘I’ve never been as warm in my life,’ Annie whispered. The pain in her back was spreading round to her front. It was like the grinding ache she was used to experiencing every month. Annie drew her knees up to ease it.

‘I think you’ve got yourself into trouble, Annie,’ Biddy said all of a sudden.

‘I’ve not!’ Annie’s reaction was swift. ‘Why do you say a thing like that?’

‘Because I know the signs.’ Biddy sat down on the side of the bed. ‘Two of my sisters got themselves into trouble, with men who promptly disappeared – that’s why Mam sent me here to keep me safe. She thinks that only pigs and cows do that kind of thing in the country.’

Annie didn’t know what to say. In her mind, a memory of Laurie Yates bending his dark curly head to kiss her bare shoulders, the way his body had swayed against hers, the way she had allowed him to lead her through into the back room …