The Travelling Man (12 page)

‘He’s coming back to marry me!’ she cried. ‘In September. On my birthday. He’s away at sea. We’re as good as married now; every bit as good.’ She drew in a breath as a pain tightened in her back, spreading itself round to her stomach in a warm wave of agony. ‘I’ve just got to keep going until September. Find a place. Work.’ She held out her hands. ‘I can do the work of three men, Biddy! I’m as strong as any lad. Stronger!’

‘Biddy? What are you doing up there?’ Mrs Martindale’s tinny voice spiralled up the stairs. ‘Fetch two candlesticks down. Quick! Mr Armstrong’s come back. He looks fit to drop.’

‘So it’s all hands to the pumps,’ Biddy said cheerfully, picking up a candlestick from the top of a mahogany tallboy. She turned at the door. ‘She’d lick the snow off his boots if he asked her to.’

Mrs Martindale couldn’t do enough for Seth. She took away his heavy coat sodden with snow, and sent Biddy to fetch his slippers. She gave him a towel to rub his hair, though Biddy could see her fingers were itching to do it herself.

She loves him, Biddy realised all at once. Not in the way a woman loves a man. Not with her being old enough to be his mother, but like a mother. Fussing, cosseting,
and
getting nowhere fast, because if ever there was a man who could fend for himself it was the animal doctor.

Biddy knew that he’d been married to a wife who went completely mad when their first baby had been born perfect in every way, but dead. She had tried to get the details from Mrs Martindale, but all she could find out was that the poor demented girl had refused to eat, ending up with no more flesh on her than a plucked sparrow.

‘It was a blessing when she passed on. She had shoulder blades on her like coat-hangers,’ the housekeeper had said. ‘You could have dropped her through a grid and it wouldn’t even have taken the skin off her big toe.’

‘There’s some nice hot broth ready for you, sir.’ Mrs Martindale bent over the black pan on the fire. ‘You go through to your den where it’s warm.’

Seth snapped his fingers and a black and white dog woke at once from a twitching sleep and moved to his side. ‘How’s the girl?’

Mrs Martindale was already spooning the broth into a dish. ‘Coming on nicely, sir. She’ll be able to leave in a few days.’

Seth glanced up the stairway as he walked across the wide flagged passage-way. ‘If the snow clears …’ All the signs of a long hard frost were there. Already a fox had come down from the high slopes and massacred five hens. Not a domestically-inclined man, Seth nevertheless reminded himself that the spirit lamp in the outside privy must be kept alight to stave off the frost. He turned back to the kitchen.

‘You can leave it all to me, sir,’ Mrs Martindale assured him. ‘Go to the outside and see to that lamp,’ she told Biddy the minute he had closed the door behind him.

‘The old flarcher,’ Biddy muttered, putting a shawl round her head and stepping out into a freezing snow-filled wind that tore her breath away.
At
three o’clock the next morning as the house slept Biddy woke up with a shuddering jerk.

The temperature in her room was below freezing, and when she padded over to the window to draw back the curtain, the pane was opaque with whorls of ice. She had definitely heard something, but what? Some noise had prodded her awake when normally she was so tired she slept the sleep of the dead. She listened, her head on one side. She padded to the door, opened it and listened again …

And heard the girl in the spare room moaning and whimpering like an animal caught in a trap.

Not many hours before she had watched her employer dose Annie Clancy with a sedative. With her own eyes she had seen him measure it out carefully, promising Annie that she would sleep like a baby and wake feeling much, much better.

Holding her candlestick high, Biddy moved along the landing.

Annie’s face was wrenched out of shape with pain. Her knees were drawn up, her long red hair almost black with sweat.

Biddy pulled back the piled blankets and saw the blood-stained sheet. She set the candle down on the high bedside table. ‘Your baby’s coming away. You’re losing it.’

‘Thank God for that! Oh, thank God for that!’

The words said themselves. Annie’s eyes were wide, her voice too high.

‘I tried to get shut of it by mangling the washing folded thick. I prayed on me knees. I jumped down the stairs – but nothing would budge it.’ She lay back as a pain gripped her. She turned her head into the pillow, tears rolling down her flushed cheeks. ‘The Lord be praised.’

‘You wicked, wicked girl!’

Mrs Martindale stood framed in the doorway, two grey plaits as thin as ropes hanging over her shoulders. ‘Do
you
know what you’re saying?’ She walked flat-footed over to the bed, wincing as she saw the sheets.

‘I’ll get them clean.’ Annie was wiping the tears away with the back of her hand. ‘A good soak in salt water then a boil with a drop of ammonia in the water will bring them up as good as new.’ She clutched her back, talking too quickly, hardly knowing what she was saying, just wanting to be left alone to bear the pain, and get whatever had to happen over with quick.

‘I think we ought to wake Mr Armstrong up.’ Biddy covered Annie up again, smoothed the damp hair back from the hot forehead. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying or doing. It’s my guess she’s been going quietly off her chump these past few months.’

‘It’s you what’s going off your chump, Biddy Baker.’ The housekeeper turned round to see Seth standing quietly in the doorway. He was fully dressed.

‘You’ve been falling asleep in your chair again, sir.’ She chided him as if he was a naughty boy. ‘Get you off to bed, sir. It’s no place for a man in here. Me and Biddy can see to things.’

In her agitation she moved round the bed as if to block any glimpse of what might be happening from him, but he was too quick for her. Before she could stretch out a hand to prevent it he pulled back the bedclothes, held his candlestick high.

‘It’s all right, Annie. You know that you’re losing the baby you were expecting, don’t you?’ His voice was gentle.

‘She doesn’t care!’ Mrs Martindale chewed the end of one of her plaits in her agitation. ‘She’s been trying to get rid of it, she said so.’

Annie’s eyes flew wide with fright as a pain gripped and burned and twisted low down in the small of her back.

‘You can’t stop in here, sir.’ The thought of it was making Mrs Martindale go hot and cold. ‘It’s one thing
with
animals, but yon’s a young woman, not a cow or a horse. It’s not seemly for you to …’

‘Off to your bed, woman!’

There was no gentleness in Seth’s voice now, no compassion in the rain-grey eyes. Biddy was thrilled with the drama of it all, sure in her mind that if the old bat hadn’t scuttled from the room Mr Armstrong would have lifted her bodily and chucked her out onto the landing.

THEY WERE WELL
into February, with no sign of a thaw, though some mornings the temperature rose briefly above freezing, causing trees and the overhanging eaves of the old house to drip continuously. The wind was still in the east, screaming at times in fury across the vast wastes of pure white snow banked high in places like miniature mountain peaks. It was beautiful and it was terrible, and Annie thrived on it.

In some ways she was a child again, able to push the night when she had lost the baby right to the back of her mind. Mr Armstrong had done things for her that flooded her with shame, though Biddy had explained that delivering calves and horses was all in a day’s work to the animal doctor, so the sight of a bit of blood and a half-finished baby wouldn’t exactly put him off his breakfast.

She told Annie that sometimes when she was stuck for what to read she borrowed a book from the big glass-fronted bookcase in his den to look at the riveting pictures of animals’ insides. In great detail, she explained what had to be done when a calf was coming out backwards. ‘First an arm and a hand has to be soaped, then …’

Annie’s eyes grew rounder as she listened. Fancy her never knowing that a cow had four stomachs, or that if they made too much gas the cow swelled up just like a balloon. Not sparing the details, Biddy told Annie what happened when a sharp instrument was jabbed in, so that compared to all what he had done for Annie it wouldn’t amount to more than pulling a tooth.

‘Mrs Martindale thought it was awful, him seeing to you, but then Mrs Martindale thinks having your bowels moved is rude,’ Biddy went on to explain, narrowing her eyes into concentrated slits as she tried to remember the illustration showing the procedure for gelding a horse.

‘For
what
?’ Annie wanted to know.

Biddy told her – in great detail.

On a day when a blizzard kept the sky dark all day, Mrs Martindale went outside to the privy and slipped on a patch of black ice, badly spraining her right wrist and twisting an ankle.

Seth examined the wrist carefully, bent her fingers back one by one, assured her there were no bones broken, made her a sling out of a three-cornered kerchief and told her to rest up for a while. ‘Annie’s here to help Biddy,’ he said, an amused glint in his eyes at the furious expression on his housekeeper’s face. ‘You don’t give her enough to do, though it strikes me she’s very capable. I suppose she told you she was bringing five younger brothers up after her mother died?’

‘Before she got herself into trouble,’ Mrs Martindale felt obligated to remind him.

In the days that followed Annie was wound up with what she recognised must be happiness. The house, with its carpets and gleaming furniture, was like the houses she had read about in the magazines she used to borrow from Edith Morris. The coal sat by the fires in scuttles, not buckets, and there were long curtains at the windows instead of torn and yellowed paper blinds. Mr Armstrong ate his meals with a white damask napkin spread on his
knee
, and there was even a small screen to stop the fire from being too hot on his face when he sat in his winged armchair reading, often well into the night.

Everything was soft instead of hard, glowing with colour instead of being drab and grey. Footsteps were silent all round the house except in the kitchen and scullery, and the small outhouse the vet used as his surgery. There was even, in a corner of the barely used lounge, a round table, covered with a white tablecloth hanging down in lacy folds. It drew Annie like a magnet, and when she was dusting in that room she would spend a lot of time stroking the aspidistra leaves with a cloth dipped in milk to bring up their shine. She would touch the cloth to savour the cobwebby feel of it, remembering the day she told the travelling man about her dream.

Now, since Mrs Martindale had hurt her wrist, it was Annie who did the cooking, Annie who took over Biddy’s job of doing the washing in an outhouse, bringing it in for ironing shades whiter than it had been before.

Biddy, too, was in her element. With the housekeeper more or less tied to a chair, she could skive off for hours, to lie on her bed reading paper-back novels about servant girls marrying lords and exchanging their print frocks for silken gowns and feathered hats. Biddy was in the wrong job and she knew it. When she married, she admitted, she would cheerfully sweep the dust under the dresser, and swear to her husband that the heat of his body would bring the creases out of his shirts, to save her the job of ironing them properly.

She watched through the window as Annie thawed out the pump when the tap in the kitchen froze solid, and she held the basket while Annie dug up as many root vegetables as she could before they were hardened into the earth. She knew she was lazy, she said, and laughed when Annie said that crafty would have been a better word.

Mrs Martindale sat in her chair in the kitchen, taking everything in. She saw the way Annie blossomed by the
day
, saw that no task seemed to be too arduous or too dirty for the bright-eyed girl with the red hair tucked up into one of Biddy’s caps. And she noticed how Mr Armstrong’s eyes followed her when he came into the kitchen. Noticed and dwelled on the fact.

Late one cold grey afternoon Seth caught Annie tending the fire in his den, kneeling down on the rug and working the bellows, encouraging the flames to leap up the chimney-back.

He was cold and bone weary. The previous night’s gales had brought even more snow, tearing down the delicate branches of a willow tree by the frozen stream. He had walked five miles, pushing his way through snow-drifts to find four cows so diseased they were fit for nothing but slaughter. There was no treatment for Johne’s disease, and already three of them were lying in great distress in their own liquid excreta. Telling the farmer, a man well into his sixties, hadn’t been easy, and Seth felt he could have handled it better if the old man had ranted and raved, or even cursed Seth for not getting there sooner. Instead, he had pushed his cap to the back of his grey head and said that what must be, must be, he reckoned, even though the cows had been like his own family. They even came when he called their names, he’d explained. Stoical people were the very devil; Seth had often thought that. The way they looked at you defied you to help them.

He sat down by the fire and immediately Annie stood up and backed away from him, remembering that Mrs Martindale had told her she must never remain in a room alone with her employer because it wasn’t right and proper.

‘Are you feeling quite well now, Annie?’ Seth reached for his pipe and began to fill it, pressing the tobacco well down in the bowl with a practised forefinger.

‘I’m feeling more than well, Mr Armstrong.’ Annie couldn’t help the smile spreading across her face. ‘I’ve never felt better in me whole life.’ She turned and walked
towards
the door. ‘I’ve never been as
warm
in the whole of me life.’

‘You certainly know how to build a fire.’ Seth took a taper from a box in the hearth and held it aloft, as Annie began to close the door behind her. ‘Annie?’ He raised his voice. ‘You didn’t know I was speaking to you, did you?’

She explained at once. ‘Only because I had my back to you, Mr Armstrong. I can hear you fine when I can see you.’