The Travelling Man (18 page)

‘I don’t think it bothered you at all.’

Annie could smell the sweat on him. It stood in beads on his red face; it ran down his grizzled sideburns. Breathing heavily he forced a knee between her legs, pinning her to the wall.

‘I need a bit of what you let that Armstrong fella have, an’ what you give that sailor fella. I wouldn’t treat you like they did.’ His voice slurred into a whine. ‘Lil’s not got an ’apporth of affection in the whole of that mangy stringy body of hers. I’ll come to you tonight, Annie, and we’ll forget about that little babbie sleeping under the ground.’

There was a frenzied cruel urgency about him. His strength was that of a roused bull, and Annie knew
she
could never break free. She took hold of the hand groping for the fastening of her skirt.

‘Not here, Barney.’ She used his Christian name for the first time. ‘Save it till tonight.’ She forced herself to touch his hair, to run her fingers through the coarse stubbled feel of it. ‘I’ll be waiting for you. The need’s in me as well.’

‘He been beggin’ you to let him have his way with you?’

When Annie went into the house she was still breathless from the struggle, still shaking from the horror of what had so nearly happened. Lily Eccles bent down and removed a gritty crust from the hand of a small boy, then passed it on to a blade-thin dog Annie didn’t recall seeing before.

‘He come in from God knows where,’ Lily explained. ‘Thinks he’s let on his feet here, the silly beggar.’ She shrugged thin shoulders. ‘You don’t need to look at me like that. I knew as soon as you come in what he’d been up to. It won’t be the first time he’s spit on his own doorstep. Not by a long chalk.’

‘You don’t for one moment think …?’ Annie took a step backwards. ‘You couldn’t think that I would let …’

Lily was leaning against the edge of the table, shaking her head from side to side.

‘Oh, stop staring at me, Annie Clancy, with those great blue eyes of yours! Do you know how old I am? Go on! Have a guess? Forty? Fifty?’ She hunched lower, supporting herself by blue-veined hands: ‘I’m twenty-eight, that’s all. I used to be as bonny as you. Bonnier! With long gold curls, and a waist that Barney could span with his two hands. I was married in a white dress with bands of blue braid round the hem, and umpteen tiny buttons all fastened with tiny little loops.’ She straightened up. ‘Nobody wanted me to marry him, but you should have seen Barney in those days. The girls couldn’t leave him
alone
. He had yellow hair that glistened in the sun, and a smile that made you want to do anything he asked of you.’ Suddenly she sagged into a chair. ‘And now … For the sake of that girl I used to be, get yourself away from here. He’ll not give up once he’s set on having you. It’s not too late, is it?’

‘Oh, no!’ Annie was wiping the hand that had stroked his hair down the side of her skirt. Wiping, wiping, as if to destroy the feel of it. ‘I’ll never … never …’

Lily nodded. ‘Then go now. This minute, while he’s in the top field. Now! Before he comes in.’ She lowered her head so that a clutch of white hairs were clearly visible springing from a wavy parting. ‘An’ don’t risk going to say goodbye to Benjie. Let him rest in peace where he is. Go,
now
before it’s too late.’

‘But what about you?’ Annie knew how it would be for the grey little woman struggling on without help. ‘Now I know you’re on my side, perhaps we could …’

Her voice tapered away as Lily’s head came up with a jerk. ‘I’m on nobody’s side, Annie Clancy! Nobody’s. D’you hear me? I hate the whole rotten world, you included. An’ him out there most of all.’

Annie took her black cloak down from a nail behind the door. ‘What about …?’ She glanced upwards. ‘My things …?’

Lily whipped round on her, eyes blazing. ‘For God’s sake, go! An’ run like the wind, because he’ll kill you if he catches up with you.’ She hoisted a whining child up from the floor, slapped its bare bottom, and turned her back.

Annie felt the fear start to grow in her; it was the squeeze of a hand round her heart, a trembling of her legs. She stepped out into the yard, and without even a glance behind her ran down the steep hill, dreading the sound of heavy footsteps following on, or a rough voice calling her name. She ran when there was no need to run any more, until the sudden cry of a blackbird startled her to a stop.

There was nothing to see for miles but green undulating hills and patchwork fields dotted with buttercups. She sat down by a low stone wall and unfastened her cloak, holding a hand over her wildly beating heart, trying to catch her breath. The air was heavy with the scent of May blossom, the leaves glistened with an early summer sheen. Annie closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe deeply until she grew calmer.

In her desperate tearing hurry she had left everything she owned behind. Already her throat felt dry and rough; soon darkness would come and the sky to the west told of rain.

‘I am never,’ she told herself, ‘going to feel as alone and unhappy as I do at this moment.’ She said it aloud, speaking slowly and deliberately.

Her mother had told her that once the barometer had dropped as low as it could, there was only one way for it to go, and that was up. Annie’s smile was grim. She admitted that at that moment she ached with loneliness. She could cope with the fear, but loneliness was another thing altogether.

Taking her unawares, a sudden anguish shouted aloud in her head. ‘You have run away again, Annie Clancy, and this time there is nowhere to run to! This time you could die out in the fields and nobody would care. Not one single person in the whole of the world! You could lie beneath a hedge until you rot, and nobody would even know.’ She didn’t want to believe it but it was true. There was no place for her because she wasn’t needed. Anywhere.

Why
should
Seth Armstrong have asked after her? She had bolted her door against him that night because he had shown her he was no different from other men. He and Barney Eccles were two of a kind. In fact, Barney Eccles was to be preferred. At least he had never
pretended
to be kind. Not like the animal doctor who had talked to her as if he really liked her. There was nothing to choose between them, nothing at all.

Annie said it aloud, then covered her mouth with her hand in a gesture of comfort, knowing that it wasn’t true.

Seth suspected that the abscess on the fetlock of Barney Eccles’s cow had been caused by a heavy blow. He had bathed the infected area to induce a pointing, then rubbed Elliman’s embrocation well in until he’d found a spot soft enough to lance. The strip of tow pushed deep into the wound would be all that was necessary now for the healing, unless the weather turned unseasonably hot and the flies got into it.

He rode on down the hill and away from the farm, deep in thought. He had done what he could, but the poor beast’s condition cried out for nourishing food and a well-drained pasture. There was no distension of the belly, but to be on the safe side Seth had given a one ounce dose of chlorodyne. And before he called back he would mix up a tonic of iron, gentian and cordial seeds, ground and mixed with linseed and bran mash. The hill farmer was over-fond of using the stick when gentle handling would have got far better results.

A neglected beast never failed to fill Seth with loathing for its owner. He had told Eccles exactly what he thought about him and ridden away with relief. And yet had felt a strange compulsion to turn back …

A great unease had come on him as he stood in the damp and draughty cowshed. All at once a weight had tightened his chest, and the notion that had he been in the least fanciful his eyes would have filled with tears.

Even now, within sight of home, the inexplicable melancholy shadowed his thinking and saddened his heart.

WHEN ANNIE HEARD
the sound of voices she jumped to her feet and ran on blindly, sure it was Barney Eccles coming after her. Keeping to the shelter of a ridge of trees she stumbled on, paying no heed when she tore her long skirts on a thorn bush. She was certain she could hear the farmer’s loud coarse voice calling her name. She imagined his hands on her, heard his bellow of a laugh, smelled his rancid sweat.

At last, on a road winding on towards the vast stretch of moorland, she stopped. Her breath rasped in her throat, a burning pain raged down her right side. She had lost her mob-cap, so that her hair tumbled down over her shoulders, the hair of a madwoman, unbrushed, unkempt. All she possessed was back at the hill farm, her one change of clothes, her hairbrush and her Bible. She could never go back for them, never. Yet how was she to go on without them? And how could anyone stretch out a hand to help her when the very sight of her would send them running in the opposite direction?

She slept that night in a derelict cowshed, huddled uncomfortably on the dirt floor, jerking awake then dozing for what she was sure could be no more than minutes. At first light she crawled on hands and knees to the opening in the shed’s rotting timbers and saw a family of rabbits nibbling grass. They were eating furiously, sitting straight up every few seconds, their ears working like antennae as they listened for the faintest suspicion of danger. The moment Annie moved they were off.

She stood up and looked around her. At the hills showing purple against the bright morning sky, at the far-off sweep of moorland, the dark patches of woods,
the
fells sloping down to the flowering fields spread like counterpanes along the valley.

The sun was already up. She was hungry, she craved a drink. She had wiped the night’s tears from her cheeks with dirty hands, her arms were peppered with bite marks, from what form of life she had no wish to know, and when a tiny hedge-sparrow flew up in sudden alarm from a small hawthorn bush she screamed.

For the whole of her life Annie had lived in a street. If a blade of grass had dared to poke its way up between the cobbles, the soot-filled air had quickly choked the life out of it. The coming of spring meant merely that the washing had an even chance of drying outside, and the boys could manage without their brown paper chest protectors.

The springs that Annie had known were no more than a gradual blending of one season into another, an imperceptible lightening and lengthening of the days, but here in the country spring burst out with a vengeance. A myriad flowers bloomed, buds popped and bees hovered. In the town spring was a glance through a window at the unexpected blueness of the sky. Here, the sky was all around, wide and suddenly terrifying.

Annie felt she wanted no part of it. More used to warmth that came from a coal fire than from the sun, she dropped to her knees in the dew-wet grass. Inside her there was a burning anger, an emotion far different from the despair she had felt when she left home. Then she was lumbered with a pregnancy, at the mercy of anyone kind enough to stretch out a hand to help her. Now, at least, she was free of all that. Fate had chucked just about enough at her for the time being. She was going to
make
things happen from now on, not just let them happen to her.

‘So what are you going to do, Annie Clancy?’ she said aloud. ‘Where are you thinking you might go now?’

She bunched the torn skirt up in her hand and tried to tuck it back into the wide waistband. She slithered
her
way down a bank of cow-parsley to a running beck fringed with tiny yellow flowers. The water was cool on her face. She drank deeply of it from her cupped hands, and when she’d tied her hair back with a strip of lace torn from her petticoat, she felt ready to go on.

Where to?

Trailing her long cloak behind her, she started walking, taking to the winding road but hiding her face when she heard the rumble of a cart coming towards her. Hunger pains gnawed at her stomach; her throat was soon parched again, but the water in a boggy ditch was muddy and brown and she let it trickle away through her fingers.

By the late afternoon she was light-headed and exhausted. Laurie had said he had gypsy blood in him so he would have known how to keep alive. He would have picked leaves, scrabbled in the long grass for mushrooms, filled his mouth with the juice from the scarlet berries on an overhanging bush.

Sobbing and swaying from side to side, Annie caught her foot in a deep wheel-rut and fell forward, flat on her face.

At a row of cottages she stopped at the gate of the first one and asked a woman in a sun bonnet picking herbs from her garden if she could have a drink of water.

‘I’m not short of pegs. Not today, thank you,’ the woman said, bustling inside and closing her front door.

A little way further down the lane Annie came face to face with a small girl in a pink cotton dress carefully carrying a pitcher of milk. Annie wished her good afternoon – or ought it to have been good evening, she no longer knew – and stood blocking her path.

The little girl was probably six or seven years old. The pink cotton dress was topped by a white pinafore. She was clean, her brown hair shone as if her mother brushed it for her every night before she went to bed. She had been brought up to be kind and good, polite to strangers, but this lady with glittering eyes frightened
her
. She gave Annie an uneasy smile, trying to step round her.

‘Please can I have a drink of your milk?’ Annie was babbling and swaying, desperate for the smooth feel of the creamy milk on her tongue. She held out her hand for the jug. ‘I don’t mean to frighten you, love. I’m thirsty.’ She forced a smile. ‘I’m spittin’ cotton for a drink.’

‘Me mam says that.’

‘My mam used to say that, too.’ It was taking every bit of Annie’s self-control to keep her voice low. ‘Give me the jug.
Please
.’

Annie saw fear cloud the wide eyes; cringed as the little girl opened her mouth wide in a surprisingly loud wail. She grabbed the jug from her.

‘I’ll tell me mam on you! Me dad’ll get you with a big stick!’

Annie drank the sweet frothy milk. She drank it the way she had often seen her father sup his ale, in a long swallow with her head thrown back. It was stealing, she supposed, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. It had been an ungodly thing to do, snatching the milk from a child’s hands, scaring the living daylights out of her. But needs must. Oh, dear God, how needs must.