The Travelling Man (15 page)

‘I can give you her name,’ her informant had told her.
‘She’s
been set up in a house by at least five men from the Exchange. They have their set times for visiting. She’s a high-class prostitute.’

The very word had upset Nellie no end. There was no proof, so she chose not to believe it. When the master went to Manchester he went on business, that was all.

Bending down to the fire-oven, she took out the first of a batch of crusty one-pound loaves. ‘I’ll fill this one with brawn and that should see you right till you get home.’ She straightened up. ‘You know that’s the best thing for you, don’t you?’

‘You
know
I won’t go home, Mrs Martindale. I’m not going home till September when Laurie will be coming for me. I’d rather die than go back there now.’

‘Well, we can’t have that, can we?’

Now that the matter was settled Nellie was inclined to be generous. Something akin to pity stirred in her flat bosom. Leaving the bread to cool on a wire-mesh tray, she rubbed the side of her long nose.

‘I’ve been thinking, Annie. Let’s have our cocoa. You mix it ready and I’ll get the kettle back on the boil. There’s a farmer I know by the name of Barney Eccles. His wife is a cousin of mine in a roundabout way.’ She sniffed. ‘Not that we’ve spoken in many a long year.’

She closed her eyes briefly at the memory of the pretty girl who had got herself into trouble, been overjoyed that the man had stuck by her, married him and gone on to have a baby every other year, or so she’d heard.

‘They’re a big family, Annie. So help won’t come amiss and I’m sure if you mention my name they’ll take you in. Lily always had a kind heart. That was probably her downfall,’ she added. ‘You must tell her that you looked after your brothers on your own after your mother died.’ She passed a cup of frothy steaming cocoa over to Annie. ‘I’ll have a word with the carter. I’m pretty sure he goes out that way of a Tuesday. One thing I’m sure of. You won’t be turned away. The farm is miles from nowhere and the Eccles’s seem to have trouble keeping
their
servants. Young girls don’t like being so far from the town.’ She gave a thin sarcastic smile. ‘But with you being betrothed and more or less passing time on until your fiancé comes to claim you, that won’t bother you, will it?’

‘Why so sudden?’ Biddy wanted to know.

‘Well, I can’t stay
here
, can I?’ The concern on Biddy’s round face made tears smart suddenly in Annie’s eyes. ‘Mr Armstrong only took me in till I was better, then the snow came. I’ve outstayed my welcome as it is.’

‘Does he know you’re going:’ Suspicion sharpened Biddy’s nose. ‘It seems funny to me you going all at once like this.’

‘Of course he knows.’ Annie told the lie easily. ‘The carrier won’t be passing this way for another week, maybe not that if the cold snap comes back.’ She forced a smile. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a place to go to.’

‘A decent place?’

Annie nodded, walked quickly to the door and climbed the stairs to her room. Before she shamed herself by sobbing on Biddy’s shoulder.

She never actually said goodbye to Biddy. Instead she stayed in her room, looking her last on the polished mahogany chest-of-drawers, the matching dressing-table with its oval stand-mirror.

She stripped her bed, folding the sheets ready for the wash, and she stood by the window staring out at the pearl-grey sky banked with heavy grey clouds. She looked her fill at the river-like stream with the willow tree trailing broken branches into swirling brown water.

Then she sat down on the edge of her bed and in her small even handwriting, using the stub of a pencil rather than go downstairs for the bottle of ink, wrote a short letter.

Dear Mr Armstrong,

This is to tell you that I am sorry to be leaving this house, and I would not be going if there was any way I could stay.

She swallowed the lump in her throat, and widened her eyes as if challenging the tears to fall.

Thank you for everything. I have been very happy under your roof. Mrs Martindale knows the place I am going to. It is a relative of hers who is always needing help.

Yours truly, Annie Clancy

A pathetic letter, saying nothing and meaning less. Annie hesitated for a moment before folding it up into a neat square. Did she owe him a letter at all?

Her hand smoothed the mattress. This was the room where her baby had come away from her in a long night of pain. With him caring for her, holding her hands, wiping the sweat from her face. Each time she had opened her eyes he had been there, watchful by the fire, his grey eyes steady when he looked at her. Promising her that all would be well.

Annie heard the rumble of wheels on the drive outside, got up from the bed and gathered her things together.

Oh, yes. For that alone she owed the animal doctor a letter.

‘Well, Annie?’

The carter was waiting, impatient to be gone. Annie could see him outside hunched over his knees on the high seat of the cart. What did the housekeeper expect her to say? By going she was making it possible for Biddy to keep her job, and after last night to stay was out of the question. So what was there left to say?

‘Well, Mrs Martindale?’ Annie opened her mouth to say more, then closed it again.

There were no tears, no last look round the by now
familiar
kitchen. ‘Say goodbye to Biddy for me.’ Annie was leaving in dignity – she was determined of that.

But as the carrier’s horse clip-clopped its way down the drive, Annie twisted round in her seat for a last glimpse of the old stone house. Hoping, in spite of her resolution, to see Biddy shaking a duster out of one of the bedroom windows.

But Biddy was lying on her bed at the back of the house, eagerly devouring an article in a magazine telling her how to enlarge her bust by six inches in less than thirty days, without resorting to pills, massage, or wooden cups. She gloated over four pictures of a woman in the throes of transformation. In the first one as flat as if she’d been spoke-shaved; two slight bud-like swellings in the second; on the third the swellings had taken on balloon-like proportions, but the last defied description. Biddy felt sure the model would never be able to stand up close to anyone again!

Annie was trying hard not to cry, and seeing this the carter left her alone. It was obvious the girl was trying to sort something out in her mind; he could see her lips moving.

What Annie was trying hard to sort out was how quickly and unexpectedly kindness could turn into something else. She shuddered. Laurie had been kind. At first he had held her gently … The animal doctor had shown her such a wealth of kindness, talking to her, telling her his secrets, so that she had felt safe with him too. She had trusted him – just as she had trusted Laurie.

Annie shook her head. Mr Armstrong must have thought her so naive, sitting with him in his room, taking off her cap the minute he asked her to, shaking her hair free. Thinking that the expression in his eyes was nothing more than pleasure at the sight of her hair. He had told her more than once it was the colour of russet leaves.

Mrs Martindale had tried to warn her. ‘Never be in
the
same room as the master on your own,’ she’d said.
Warning
, when all the time Annie had thought she was just being her bitter pernickety self.

And yet, last night when he had told her about his father, she had seen the pain in his eyes, she had responded by going to him and twining his fingers in her own – with
kindness
. Annie frowned. Because he had accepted that a girl who was going to have a baby by a man she confessed she hardly knew could hardly be an innocent, he had … he had …

A groan escaped her as she remembered the way he had pulled her up towards him, holding her so close she could feel the hardness of him, kissing her so that her lips still felt bruised …

‘All right, lass?’

The carrier, a man of forty-nine, with two daughters of his own, raised his eyebrows as this young lass shot him a look of such apprehension he almost fell off his seat. And all for trying to be kind, he muttered, relapsing into silence once again.

When Seth rode back that evening, a bedraggled puppy with a broken foreleg curled up in his saddlebag, he was exhausted and as hungry as the proverbial hunter. Striding into the house, he made straight for the kitchen.

‘Where’s Annie?’ He put the puppy down by the fire. ‘Give him some warm gravy when you’ve finished what you’re doing, Biddy. They weren’t prepared to nurse him where I found him, and I’d be damned if I was going to put the little fella down.’

His own dog lumbered in from the hall, circled the puppy for a while then began to lick it.

‘Where’s Annie?’ Seth said again.

The network of wrinkles on his housekeeper’s forehead deepened before she answered him. ‘She’s gone, sir. She went with the carrier this morning. I packed her some food and she went.’

‘Went where?’ Seth towered over her. ‘She had
nowhere
to
go, for God’s sake! What the devil are you talking about, woman?’

‘I tried to stop her, sir, but she’d made her mind up.’

‘Biddy?’ Seth’s face was working in disbelief.

‘She told me you knew, sir.’ Biddy refused to look at the woman standing by the table, twisting her hands together. ‘She said she had a place to go to, and that if she didn’t take the carrier’s cart today she could be here indefinitely.’

‘I knew nothing!’

Seth was aware of his housekeeper and his servant girl staring at him as if he’d gone mad. He made for the door. Whenever Annie Clancy went or wherever she went wasn’t his province. He had brought her here limp and unconscious, thinking she was a tramp woman, and he had tended her, just as he would have tended a distressed animal, when she had lost her baby that night. Her bright presence had gladdened his heart. She had been happy here, he could have sworn it. When she was better and the colour had come back to her cheeks, her trusting eyes had given away her happiness.

But last night he had betrayed that trust. In one unthinking moment he had put the fear of God in her. She had bolted her door against him, believing that he would break it down. The freezing wind had stung his cheeks to scarlet, but now the colour drained away, leaving him grey and ill-looking.

Nellie stood up and gripped the back of her chair hard to still the trembling of her hands. The lie came easily to her lips.

‘I tried to stop her, sir, but she’d made up her mind.’ The small head went to one side. ‘She seemed upset about something.’

For a moment she thought her employer would strike her. He was staring at her with such a blazing anger in his eyes, his whole face distorted. He was remembering how last night, as he had stood in the hall watching young
Annie
rushing up the stairs, he had caught a glimpse of a door opening slightly, the door of his housekeeper’s room. And now she was putting two and two together and coming up with God alone knew what.

‘You let her go?’ he thundered. ‘You allowed a young girl like Annie to go with the carrier in this weather: She could die out there! Do you realise that? Didn’t you even
try
to stop her? Didn’t you even ask her where she was going?’

‘It wasn’t me what upset her, sir.’

The words were said quietly, but they struck home. Seth crumpled as if he’d been punched from behind. ‘How long has she been gone?’

‘All day. She’ll be miles away by now. Back home by this time, I feel sure of that.’

‘Did you know the carter?’

‘It was one I’ve never seen before.’

Clicking his finger and thumb for the dog to follow him, Seth crossed the stone passageway and went into his den, calling out first for his meal, telling them to look sharp about it. Slamming the door so hard that the very foundations of the old house seemed to tremble.

Nellie Martindale knew then that throwing Annie Clancy’s letter on the fire had been justified. The master was badly shaken; she knew him too well for him to be able to hide a thing like that. She wouldn’t put it past him riding out to fetch Annie back if he knew where she’d gone. But he didn’t know, did he? She stared into the fire as if she could still see the flames licking the note, shrivelling it away.

EDITH MORRIS WAS
a single-minded woman. If she had been able to persuade herself years ago that her duty lay with the black heathens in Africa rather than with her mother she would, she often told herself, be running a Mission School by now, teaching rows of woolly-haired children about reading, writing, arithmetic and Jesus.

She was too old at fifty to realise her ambition. She accepted that, but since her mother’s death her life had taken on an emptiness that terrified her. She was working full-time at the mill, going out in the dark and coming home in the dark, but it was closing the front door behind her, knowing that she wouldn’t even hear the sound of her own voice till the next day, that defeated her.

The bed by the window had been taken back upstairs. It left a gap that Edith filled with a tall pedestal table bearing an aspidistra plant. She would sit by the fire after the evening chores were done remembering the days when she had gone to work sharing her mother’s shawl, because there wasn’t the money for a coat for the painfully thin twelve year old girl. Her father she couldn’t remember at all, but her mother had told her how he was killed on a factory outing, trampled by the horse drawing the waggonette. ‘The man who got him from under the wheels was drunk for a month afterwards,’ she would say.

Edith wondered what it would have been like if she’d married: If her mother hadn’t taken to her bed all those years ago, tying her daughter to her as surely as if she’d had her at the end of a rope. She wondered if the rest of her life was going to be as empty as this. Coming home to this hurting silence, staring
at
the aspidistra plant, almost willing it to talk to her.

She couldn’t envisage a future so barren. She started a purl row, felt a sharp pain stab at her heart, and knew there was something she
could
do about her loneliness if she was persistent enough.