The Travelling Man (13 page)

‘How long have you been like that?’ Seth busied himself lighting his pipe, watching the way she narrowed her eyes in concentration when she couldn’t see his lips move.

‘It’s only at one side, Mr Armstrong. A lot of people are a bit deaf in one ear.’

‘At seventeen?’

Automatically Annie put a hand over the ear her father had boxed more often than she cared to think about. ‘I’ve no trouble when folks don’t mumble,’ she said, escaping round the door. Closing it firmly behind her.

Like a flash Seth was across the room, wrenching the door open and calling out in a loud voice, taking no chances that she couldn’t hear him: ‘Annie! Come through into the surgery. I want to have a look at that ear!’

‘He’s got no right examining her,’ Mrs Martindale chunnered. ‘She hears what she wants to hear, that madam does.’

‘Likely he remembers the marks on her back and guessed her father had done her ear as well. I think Mr Armstrong’s got a soft spot for Annie,’ Biddy said, just to make the housekeeper mad. ‘You know what he’s like when he finds an animal that’s been ill-treated. He can’t do enough for it.’

‘Annie Clancy isn’t an animal. She’s a girl with bad blood in her who thinks she’s landed on her feet.’

‘That was a lovely stew she made today,’ Biddy
said
, rubbing salt in. ‘Mr Armstrong had two helpings.’

Mrs Martindale felt sure her blood was actually boiling. There was no justice, no justice at all. There was she laying with nobody else but her husband, and that only the once, while Annie Clancy had miscarried her illegitimate baby in the spare room upstairs, gloating that she was glad to be rid.

Nellie withdrew her right hand from the sling and pulled at the tight bandaging. By the end of the week she would be on her feet. A thaw was coming, she knew the signs. Yesterday she had watched through the window as starlings landed on a large frozen puddle down by the field path, but tomorrow there could easily be the first faint signs that spring was on its way. Annie had come in with a clutch of snowdrops in her hand, sighing over them as if they were the first she’d set eyes on.

‘They
are
the first she’s seen,’ Biddy said. ‘There was no green anywhere in the street where Annie lived.’

‘Pull the other leg,’ said Nellie Martindale, wiggling the fingers of her right hand up and down. To get them going.

The way young Annie looked at him after he’d carefully examined her ear reminded Seth of the old farmer bravely accepting the loss of four of his small herd of cows. It was a look Seth equated with the passive indifference of someone who, while used to hoping for the best, had come to expect the worst.

‘Who did this to you, Annie? And
this
?’ He touched her back, laying the flat of his hand against her shoulder blades.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Annie twisted away from him. ‘I’m in fine fettle, Mr Armstrong. I always have been. I’m as strong as an ox.’ She smiled. ‘An’ why shouldn’t I be? It’s like being on me holidays working here.’ She gave him a mischievous smile. ‘Three strapping women running a house like
this
? I could do it meself with one hand tied behind me back.’

Seth’s surgery was furnished with the bare essentials. Most of his work was done out in the fields, in the outlying hill farms. He had crawled on his hands and knees the last mile back to the house that afternoon, a mile that had stretched into fifty as he had fought his way through snow-drifts frozen to iron hardness, on and on through a landscape held in a pitiless white grip. The cold was still steeped inside his bones. Out there in the freezing wilderness he had been seized with such a sensation of loneliness that the hurt of it had taken him totally unawares.

Frantically he had tried to beat it away, groping his way back along the well-known path, merged now into one vast freezing field. Who would care if he never got back to the house? Mrs Martindale? Yes, she would care; she would grieve for him as a mother grieves for her child. He had winced as his gloved hand, brushed against his face, scraped hard ice down his cheek. Someone else, surely? Since his wife died, his isolation had been self-induced. Friends, turned away and rebuffed too often, stayed away.

He turned his back on Annie and walked quickly out into the passage.

‘Sir?’ She followed him into his den. No wonder Mr Armstrong’s face had set as hard as a block of concrete after she’d told him she could do the work of the whole house with one hand tied behind her back. She had no means of knowing just how wealthy he was, but he couldn’t be making a fortune when some days it took him all his time to visit just one poor hard-working farmer. Perhaps even now he was wondering how he was going to pay his bills, and whether he could afford to keep on both Mrs Martindale and Biddy, never mind her.

‘I was only swanking what I just said.’ She stared straight ahead. ‘Both Mrs Martindale and Biddy work like galley slaves.’

‘What did you say?’ From his chair Seth stared at Annie’s troubled face, crimson with the effort of covering up what she saw as an enormous blunder. ‘Shut the door and sit down.’

‘One person really couldn’t do all the …’ Annie did as she was told, perching on the very edge of a standchair, determined to set things right.

‘It was your father who beat you, wasn’t it?’

The shame of it brought Annie to her feet.

‘Did you know that by constantly hitting you hard across the side of your face, he’s managed to perforate your eardrum? Do you realise that you may always be hard of hearing in that ear? You must never go back home, Annie. Never!’

Before he could lean forward to light a taper at the fire, she was there, holding the light to the bowl of his pipe. ‘I will have to go back come September, but only to be there when my … when Laurie comes to claim me.’ She went back to her chair. ‘I’ve thought it all out, Mr Armstrong. My stepmother will let me stop a while. She’s all shout, really.’

‘Laurie? The sailor? The man you told me about that night?’

Annie blushed and nodded. ‘The man I’m going to marry.’

‘Who went away when he found you were going to have his child?’

‘He didn’t know!’The words burst from her in a great wail. ‘He told me he’d seen to it that I wouldn’t have a baby. That’s how wrong you are!’

When the door banged behind her Seth sat for a long time smoking his pipe and staring into the fire. The burning anger he’d felt at being taken unawares by his own vulnerability out there in the snow that afternoon was now replaced by a towering rage against a man he had never met, nor was ever likely to.

Nor was young Annie likely ever to see the travelling man again. Why in God’s name hadn’t she cottoned on
to
that fact months ago? She was far from stupid. Far, far from that. An untutored intelligence shone from her eyes, and if she’d told him once that she’d been top of the class at school she’d told him a dozen times. Seth smiled to himself. She could change her accent in a flash. Look at the day when the rather superior gardener from up at the Lodge had appeared at the back door with a sick and sorry-for-itself black and white puppy pushed down deep inside his jacket.

‘Mr Armstrong won’t keep you waiting long. He’s busy with another patient,’ he’d heard her say. In an accent so cut-glass it almost shimmered.

For the first time in a long and weary day he laughed out loud. She had such a unique turn of phrase. When she came into a room it was as though a light came on. Seth shook his head at his fanciful thinking, puffed away at his pipe and relaxed properly for the first time that day.

Mrs Martindale stared at Annie Clancy in trembling disgust. The girl was worse than a hair-shirt to her, always irritating. Not a scrap of respect for her betters.

‘It was you slamming the master’s door just now, wasn’t it?’

‘It was.’ Annie leaned over the sink and angrily swished a tablespoon through the tepid water. ‘He’d no right to say what he did.’

Nellie Martindale actually felt the skin tighten on her scalp. A wisp of red hair was straggling down from beneath Annie’s cap, and she had an almost uncontrollable urge to hobble across the flagged floor and yank Annie’s head back with it in order to spit in her face. Not once in all the years she’d worked in this house, no matter what the circumstances, had she expressed feelings. She’d been trained to accept that the lower orders weren’t expected to show emotion in front of their betters, that your heart could be bleeding inside but you never let on. Never!

Her voice shook. ‘What did Mr Armstrong say?’

‘Not much. He didn’t need to. He just hinted that he didn’t believe I would be getting married come September.’ Annie plunged her hands deep into the grey washing-up water. ‘He was laughing at me! I’m not daft. I know when I’m being laughed at.’

‘He has every right to laugh at you.’ Nellie’s voice quivered with the intensity of her feelings. ‘
I’m
laughing at you.
Biddy ’s
laughing her head off, though she does it behind your back. Anybody with an ’apenth of sense is laughing at you.’

Annie swung round, the dish-mop brandished like a truncheon. ‘You know nowt!’ she shouted, all attempt at refinement forgotten. ‘You’ll all be laughing at t’other side of your stupid faces when Laurie comes back to claim me. An’when I’m married to him I’ll drive past here in my own waggonette, and I won’t give you the time of day! You’ll still be working every hour God sends when I’m sitting on a velvet chair giving me orders to the likes of you!’

‘How
dare
you!’ Nellie sprang up too quickly, winced and sat back again. ‘The minute yon snow’s melted you’re out of this house quicker than a stick of greased lightning, then we’ll see … My God, we’ll see … A velvet chair,’ she chuntered, setting her chair rocking furiously, staring through narrowed eyes at Annie’s irritating back, which of its own volition seemed to be trying to best her. ‘Just wait till a thaw sets in, madam.’ Nellie felt she could afford to let the matter drop for the time being. ‘Just wait …’

At the end of the next week the weather suddenly turned warmer. The snows melted, overflowing the stream at the bottom of the garden, so that for the whole of one day it roared like a torrent. At the end of the following week a watery sun set the lingering snow glistening like sugar in a crystal dish.

‘So when will you be going, Annie Clancy?’

Mrs Martindale asked the question straight out, her small eyes as hard and grey as moorland stones.

Annie was peeling potatoes into an enamel bowl in the stone slopstone. They were green in parts where the frost had got at them, but there was still enough for a good boiling in what was left when she’d cut the bad away. She jabbed her knife into a gnarled and knobbly specimen.

‘I’ll mention it to Mr Armstrong,’ she said, hoping the fear wasn’t showing in her voice. Since she’d cheeked Mrs Martindale the other week the housekeeper hadn’t referred to the matter at all. Now Annie knew she had been merely biding her time, waiting for the weather to change.

That morning Seth had ridden out at first light to visit the outlying farms rendered inaccessible by the long weeks of snow and frost. Biddy was supposed to be giving the upstairs rooms a good going over, but Annie had seen her take a heavy tome from the bookcase and stagger upstairs with it. To gloat over the pictures, Annie knew that. She flinched as the housekeeper repeated her question.

‘When will you be going, then? You weren’t banking on stopping here for good, were you?’

Nellie lifted a batch of dough from a wide stone crock and began to knead it with her left hand, holding the right one awkwardly to steady the bowl. She had given a lot of careful thought to what she was going to say next, and with Biddy out of the way, this was her opportunity.

‘I’m going to speak out of turn,’ she said. ‘Best face me so you can hear me properly. I don’t want to shout.’

‘I can hear you, Mrs Martindale.’ Annie stared hard at the small working mouth. ‘I can hear you even if you whisper.’

Nellie jerked her head up at the ceiling. ‘Biddy doesn’t pull her weight. I know that and so do you. But she’d have to pull her socks up if you weren’t here. You’ve
taken
her job on, Annie Clancy, and the lazy tyke’s let you.’

‘I haven’t meant …’

‘Well of course you haven’t
meant
. You’ve just wheedled yourself into the running of this house, trying to make yourself indispensable.’

‘That’s not true!’

Annie could feel her temper rising. The housekeeper was misjudging her cruelly. What she had done, the work she had undertaken willingly, had been a service given in good faith, in gratitude for the kindness shown to her. Couldn’t this thin stick of a woman see that in return for kindness Annie Clancy would do
anything
? That here in this quiet house, where voices were hardly ever raised in anger, she had found a peace never known to her before.

‘What I did was out of gratitude,’ she said. ‘But if Mr Armstrong says I must go, then so be it.’ Her head drooped. ‘I’ll speak to him myself when he comes back this evening.’

Annie could feel that her hands, clenched by her sides, were trembling. What a fool she’d been to go on happily from day to day, thinking, believing that she was … that she belonged. She began to feel sick.

Nellie Martindale dusted the flour off her hands and sat down. The lost look on Annie Clancy’s face was upsetting her, and she didn’t like being upset. Nobody could say she was a hard woman, but what she was doing was right. What had happened that morning had convinced her. She twisted a tea-cloth round and round till it resembled a rope.

There’d been no call for Annie to get up to see the master off on his rounds, but she had looked through her window that morning and seen Annie laughing up at him as he sat on his horse. She had seen her handing a small bundle up to him, her red hair hanging loose down her back. Food to sustain him, she’d explained when challenged, and hot cocoa and a dried haddock
creamed
in the pan for him to eat before he left the house.

‘He took some persuading to sit down at the table,’ she’d laughed, ‘but I told him I was used to feeding men in the middle of the night before they went to work, so in the end he gave in.’