The Travelling Man (19 page)

She set the jug down carefully on a moss-covered stone and ran as fast as she could, on down the lane, past a farm with a barking dog straining at a chain, across a ploughed field and into the cool shade of a wood.

Leaving her cloak behind her where she’d dropped it as she’d snatched the jug.

The milk had given her fresh hope and an upsurge of energy. If only she could knock on a door,
any
door, and ask for work. If only she looked more presentable, less like a living scarecrow. The loss of her cloak didn’t seem to matter. To go back for it would be impossible. She moved further into the wood.

As she came out of it, she heard a dog bark, then
stepped
back in alarm as a collie with a muddied tangled coat ran towards her, tail wagging, panting with excitement.

‘Down boy! Down!’

Turning round quickly, Annie saw a man carrying an axe, a square, heavily-built man with a face almost covered in hair. She held her breath, poised to run. As he came closer she could see the sharp cutting edge of the axe and imagined he was weighing it in his hands before he struck. The euphoric mood brought on by the pint of milk had long since gone. She knew that she looked like a crazy woman out of Bedlam, with her trailing and torn skirts, her dirty hands and face, and no dignity to her at all.

The shadows were lengthening. Soon it would be dark, and as far as she could see she was mile upon mile from anywhere. The hills seemed to be closing in on her; it was very quiet, the only sounds being the song of a bird and the far distant sound of children’s voices as they played out in what was left of the light.

She stared at the man standing in front of her saying nothing. Biding his time before he pounced – that was obvious. Why didn’t he move? Why didn’t he say something?

‘Get away from me!’ she shouted, picking up her skirt and turning to run, stumbling over tree roots, making for the sound of the voices. When she tripped and fell she lay there, her arms over her face, awaiting the inevitable.

‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere afore, lass?’

The voice was concerned, the question so unexpected that Annie could only twist round to stare up at him, her mouth wide. The whiskery man had large creamy teeth, a broad forehead, high cheekbones and penetrating brown eyes.

‘You wasn’t running away from
me
, was you, lass?’ Shifting the axe to his other arm, he held out a hand to help Annie to her feet. ‘I know I’m not exactly God’s gift to women, but I’m not that bad, am I?’ His eyes
sobered
for a moment as he took in Annie’s appearance. ‘You wouldn’t exactly pass for the May Queen either, lass.’ He took off his cap and scratched his head. ‘I know now where I’ve seen you afore. It was early on in the New Year when Rex here had half his nose bit off by an alsatian the size of a Blackpool tram.’ He laid a hand for a moment on the dog’s domed head. ‘I took him over to Seth Armstrong’s place and you was there. I saw you in the kitchen with that housekeeper of his – the one who looks as if she’s lost half-a-crown and found a threepenny-bit. Mr Armstrong asked me to go through into the house for a warming drop of whisky.’

As he mentioned the vet’s name, he jerked his head in the direction of a wooded slope. Annie spoke quickly. ‘Is Mr Armstrong’s house close to here? I was sure I was miles away. Miles and miles.’ Her eyes were bleak with despair. ‘I’ve lost my way good and proper.’

‘Well, it’s more than a good spit away, lass. It were a long walk, cold enough to freeze your cockles, but folks walk further than that to see Seth Armstrong. There’s nowt much goes wrong with an animal that he can’t put right. You running away from there, lass? I wouldn’t have thought …’

‘The housekeeper,’ Annie said quickly. ‘We didn’t get on.’ She fell into step beside him. ‘But I’ve not come from there.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose you know the Eccles’s farm? I’ve been working there.’

‘Barney Eccles!’ The man turned and looked at her sharply. ‘How on earth did you come to be working for him? He’s a real bad lot is Barney Eccles. He’d make owd Nick himself look like he was wearing an ’alo.’

‘Mrs Martindale sent me to him. She said Mrs Eccles was a distant cousin.’

‘Everybody round here’s a distant cousin to somebody. That filthy old devil hasn’t been …?’

‘No!’ Annie said at once. ‘I wasn’t going to give him a chance.’ Her chin came up. ‘I’d’ve kneed him if he
hadn’t
been as strong as a bull. So I ran away. Without stopping to get me things.’

‘When?’

‘Day before yesterday.’

‘An’you slept rough last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Food? Water?’

‘Milk,’ Annie said. ‘A whole pint. I whipped the jug out of a little girl’s hands and drank it down.’ She lowered her head. ‘And now you know.’

‘Cheese and flippin’ rice!’ Adam Page was at a loss what to say or do. He blamed Seth Armstrong’s housekeeper for this lot. She knew right enough what went on at the Eccles’s farm. He glanced sideways at the slightly built girl trudging along by his side. She was sticking to him like a stray dog would if you chanced to give it a kind word or a pat on the head. Nellie Martindale should be shot at dawn for sending this young lass to work for Barney Eccles. If ever a man deserved a long spell in prison he did. Hanging was too good for him. Hung, drawn and quartered would be more like it.

Annie looked up at the sky. ‘It’s spittin’.’

‘Aye, I think you’re right, lass. It’s been threatening to rain all day.’

Adam’s mind was working overtime. If he asked the lass into his cottage he could be letting himself in for more than he’d bargained for. Besides, Clara would have something to say about him turning up with this bedraggled creature. Sick in her body Clara might be, but her mind was as keen as a newly-stropped razor.

They trudged along in silence for the best part of half a mile. It was raining in earnest now. Annie lowered her head and let the weather do what it willed. She had stopped trying to hold up her torn skirt or prevent it trailing along behind her. She stubbed her toe on a loose stone, and wished she was dead.

‘My wife’s delicate,’ the man beside her said suddenly.

Annie knew what he meant right away. She’d heard that word often and it always signified the same thing. Delicate meant consumptive. It meant a member of a family lying downstairs in a bed in the same room with the cooking being done on the fire, meals eaten round the table, family life carrying on as usual. It meant coughing and spitting blood at the end, then the inevitable funeral with the box on a cart and relatives with black armbands on their coats walking behind it through the streets to the cemetery. Being delicate meant you were on your last.

‘I’m the gardener at that big house you can just see over yon through those trees.’ They were out of the field and down on to the lane now. Adam pointed. ‘You can just about see the chimneys. I live a bit further on, round that corner. In a cottage that goes with the job.’

‘I see.’

Annie accepted that he was preparing her for the moment when he left her at the door of his cottage. She was embarrassing him, putting him under some sort of obligation walking with him all this way, sticking to him like a limpet. But soon it would be dusk, then dark. Last night it had been fine – tonight it looked as though it was going to rain like the clappers.

‘T’master up at the big house promised me the cottage for the rest of my life. I’ve worked for him since I were ten years old.’

‘That’s a long time,’ Annie said automatically, concentrating hard on putting one foot in front of the other.

‘Thirty year, man and boy.’

In spite of her despair Annie couldn’t help but turn in surprise. This man with the straight back, the leathery face – what she could see of it – was the same age as her father, give or take a year or so. A sudden picture came into her mind of her father coming up the street stoopshouldered in his pit clothes, carrying his big tea-can, his snap-can fastened to his belt. She remembered how he had often been too tired to wash, and how he’d just sat there in his chair by the fire, the whites of his
eyes
gleaming from his black face. When he’d washed his face it still never looked clean. Beneath the coal dust his face was grey, criss-crossed by blue scars, dented with old injuries.

For a moment something akin to pity made the tears prick behind Annie’s eyes. Something that could have been mistaken for love.

Jack Clancy had just about had enough of that old maid Edith Morris pestering him about Annie. With her sunken cheeks and tight lips pressed so closely together they were almost hidden away, she was a menace, a proper pest.

‘Annie is not at the workhouse. I’ve made enquiries and she’s not at
any
workhouse for miles around.’ Edith was determined to stand her ground. To best this uncouth man sitting gaunt-faced and subdued, waiting to go off on the night shift down the mine.

The week before Jack had twisted his back escaping a sudden fall of coal. It was paining him badly but he accepted the injury, as he had all the others, as part and parcel of his working life. He had the house to himself for once, and was relishing the fact. He’d been savouring the quiet, drawing it into himself for a precious few minutes, until now.

‘So she’s not at the bloody workhouse?’ Jack’s eyes flicked sideways. ‘Does it matter where she is? The divil melt her. What’s it got to do with you where she is?’

‘She’s your daughter, Mr Clancy! Your flesh and blood.’ Edith looked away from the greasy black frying pan in the middle of the unscrubbed table. Bacon and cabbage by the smell of it. The immigrant Irish seemed to live on the stuff. ‘If she didn’t land up at the workhouse, then where is she?’ Edith stabbed a finger in the air.

What Jack Clancy said after that was best forgotten, Edith told herself, hurrying back down the street to her silent tidy house. You had to remind yourself that we were all God’s creatures, the uncouth, the blasphemous,
and
the filthy-tongued. Inside every man or woman was the God within. Edith had always believed that. The most hardened sinner had that grain of goodness deep in his soul. But what if a man was without a soul? What if his wicked tongue had shrivelled it away? She was sure that where Jack Clancy’s heart should be was a big slab of coal.

The brass pot holding the aspidistra needed a bit of a rub up. Edith went to the drawer for a nicely folded clean duster. She muttered to herself as she polished, drawing her lips further in, giving the impression of being toothless.

‘I’ll find young Annie if it’s the last thing I do. I’ll find her if it costs me my last farthing …’

She refused even to think that Annie might be dead. Lying out there on the far moors, turning up as a skeleton in years to come. She also refused to entertain the notion that Annie might have let on her feet and be far happier than ever she was living at home. The yawning gap in Edith’s life had to be filled. She had to be needed, and since her mother had died no one had asked anything of her, never even knocked at her door and asked for a drink of water. Her prayers to the Lord Jesus had as yet been unanswered.

‘I am an empty vessel,’ she cried aloud in the middle of the sleepless night. ‘Fill me with the goodness of Thy love. Do not send me empty away.’

Adam Page stopped at the gate of his cottage with one hand on the latch. The lass stopped too, just as he had known she would, staring at him with her big eyes. The rain dripped from her hair, her nose, her chin. She shivered and shook; she was a drowned rat. He had the feeling that if she stood there for long enough she would run down herself, ending up as a puddle.

‘Do you think they might take me on up at the big house?’ she was saying. ‘I’m a good worker. I had five brothers at home, and at the Eccles’s farm there were
seven
children, and one of them a baby.’ At the thought of Benjie she gave a loud sob.

Adam was a slow thinker, but when he spoke he said what he meant, and meant what he said. Working on the land since the age of ten, marrying a woman who never used two words if one would do, he was totally out of his depth when it came to making decisions. Now he was faced with a big one. To make time he clicked the gate open then closed it again. Getting involved was something of which he had always fought shy. He could take the lass in to the fire; he could feed her up, then what? She was on the road, when all was said and done. Homeless. A tramp. She said she’d run away from Barney Eccles, and he could understand that. But why from home? And why from Seth Armstrong’s place? There was something fishy about a young lass who was always running away.

‘I’ll be on my way, then,’ Annie said, watching his face. There was a lamp set in the window of the cottage. She bet the kettle would be on the hob, and a crusty loaf on the table. In the place where her stomach should be there was a great empty hole. She felt ill.

Suddenly, without any warning, what Mrs Greenhalgh had said on that last morning at home popped into her head: ‘If they won’t let you into the workhouse, faint on the doorstep,’ she had advised. ‘A decent faint never comes amiss.’

‘Needs must,’ Annie told herself, buckling her knees, closing her eyes and sinking to the ground.

‘
YOU WERE SENT
in answer to a prayer, Annie Clancy. I hope you realise that.’

Annie had been at the gardener’s cottage for two days. Two nights of sleeping in a comfortable bed, on a feather mattress so billowy it folded itself round her, like flower petals closing. There was a bedding chest and a bamboo table holding a flowered water jug and basin, and in a small locker by the side of the bed, a matching chamber-pot.

There was a well in the back garden, not too close to the privy; there was wood for the gathering, a big black kettle hanging over the fire for constant hot water, and a copper in the alcove behind the fireplace if more was needed for washing clothes. There was a deep red frill round the cornice and a red bobbled chenille cloth on the table, flowers in pots on the wide window sills, a grandfather clock in a corner, pewter tankards in a row on the mantelpiece, a bare brick floor and a box of Sunlight soap set to harden on a high shelf.