The Travelling Man (21 page)

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Then look after him well, Annie Clancy. You hear me?’ With a flick of her whip Margot urged the pony on, leaving Annie looking after her spellbound.

Plain Mrs Gray she might be. Not Lady Gray as she deserved to be, but Annie could recognise gentry when she saw it. In her dress made up of two different plaids, with a small velvet hat pinned to her upswept dark hair, she had looked every inch a Duchess. The encounter was the closest Annie had ever been to the aristocracy, and she felt suitably overawed. Manners, breeding, all were there, along with the dignity on which her mother had set such store.

‘We never saw anybody like her down our street,’ she told Clara when she went inside. ‘She spoke to me just like she was an ordinary person.’

‘I’m not going to last long,’ Clara said.

‘What’s puzzling me is how she got her hair to stick up at the back of her hat like that. It looked as if it had been brushed over a pin cushion. Nobody could have hair that thick. Biddy told me that she’d once worked for a titled lady who sat for an hour every morning having her hair brushed and pinned up. Fancy having a maid to brush your hair! Biddy said she …’

‘I keep getting this numb feeling in my hands and feet,’ said Clara. ‘Feel at my fingers, Annie. It’s the same with my toes. I’m dying inch by inch.’

Annie obliged, rubbing the cold hands between her own, taking off Clara’s slippers and doing the same to her thin, blue-veined feet.

She couldn’t get the sight of Mrs Gray out of her mind. All that splendour, all that colour! Even the pony looked as if it had been polished up with a silk scarf. And the blues and greens of the plaid dress, a misty blue and a muted green. Clara had said all Mrs Gray’s dresses came from Paris, and that she had a maid to help her on with her clothes.

‘And nothing wrong with her neither?’ Annie had cried.

‘It’s not true that we’re all equal in the sight of God,’ she told Clara now, as she dealt with one icy-cold foot then the other. ‘Mrs Gray is more equal than any of us. I can’t get over her. I really can’t.’

‘It’s a sign that you’re on your way out when your extremes go numb,’ said Clara. ‘I won’t see Christmas.’

Margot Gray nurtured a guilty disappointment in her step-daughters. Her husband’s first wife had possessed an hour-glass figure and a cameo-like prettiness, but by some unfortunate distribution of genes, both Dorothea and Abigail resembled their father, even to the florid face, hawk-like nose and thick-set body. Puddings, Margot considered them to be, with high fashion wasted on them. Their slow minds were attuned to horses, horses, horses and even, God help them, Harry’s fine herd of pigs.

Her observant eye had taken in the slimness of Annie’s waist and the voluptuous swell of her breasts in the too tight dress. Given the right clothes and the right accent, of course, Adam’s waif and stray could have every eligible bachelor for miles hovering on the doorstep.

The hair could be a problem, though. Margot clearly remembered red-haired children being left to live out their days hidden away in workhouses because of the colour of their hair. She touched her own hair. God
alone
knew what colour hers would be without its weekly rinse of cold strong tea. She leaned closer to the tripled mirror on her dressing-table, pushing at the front of her hair, searching for any sign of greyness at the roots. The gardener’s girl would almost certainly go a pure white if she lived to be old. Red-haired women were lucky in that way. Now she, if she let hers go the way nature intended, would be a dirty battleship grey. She shuddered.

Annie Clancy had intrigued her. Margot never listened to servants’ gossip, naturally, but according to Dorothea they were saying down in the kitchen that the gardener’s girl had been found wandering the roads without a possession to her name. Thrown out by a hill farmer who had got her pregnant and abandoned her.

Margot plucked out a suspect hair. But if that were true where was the baby? How had Adam got his puritanical wife to accept a fallen girl living in the cottage? It was all a great mystery.

Margot sighed. Middle-age was a bore. Old age she refused to contemplate. She lifted her chin and slapped it hard with the backs of her hands, wincing at the incipient double chin.

It would be interesting to know where young Annie Clancy had come from. Her accent had Margot puzzled. There was a refinement about it that conflicted with another story she’d heard that Annie was a product of the workhouse.

Thinking about the workhouse reminded her. What Margot saw as ‘the servant problem’ was a constant worry. She had been advised to write to the vicar’s wife to ask if she knew of any village girl who would be willing to live in. A much more acceptable way of solving ‘the servant problem’ than applying direct to the nearest workhouse.

Margot couldn’t bear the thought that she was getting wrinkles round her mouth, but the mirror never lied.
Maybe
if she did her lip stretching exercises more often she could keep them at bay.

‘Ee aw, ee aw, ee aw,’ she said, doing them now.

She suddenly stopped in mid-stretch. If the gardener’s girl hadn’t come from the workhouse, why had she been running away? With nothing but the clothes she stood up in, according to one tale.

It was better than a story in one of the weekly magazines her parlour maid liked to read.

Biddy Baker missed Annie a lot.

She couldn’t get over Annie leaving like that without saying a proper goodbye. Nothing in the house was quite the same somehow with no one to have a bit of a laugh with. Mr Armstrong was out all the hours that God sent, coming back cold and wet most days, slamming the door of his den behind him and forgetting to go to bed some nights, according to Mrs Martindale.

The old woman was a flamin’ pain in the neck, always kow-towing to the animal doctor, fawning on him till his temper flared. Once or twice Biddy had wondered aloud how Annie Clancy was faring, only to have her head bitten off as if she’d said something too rude to repeat.

Biddy had made a lovely story up in her head. It went like this:

Annie Clancy turned up at the house one day dressed to kill, wearing a fur hat, a fur muff and kid gloves with a ribbon-trimmed green velvet dress. It turned out that down in London, in an antique shop, a locket had been found containing a silken strand of bright red hair. On the back of the locket was an inscription giving the name of a man related to royalty. The antique dealer had traced him and it had all come out that Annie was the daughter of the man’s mistress. On his deathbed the old man had whispered a Lancashire address, and through this Annie had eventually been traced. No further proof was needed when the hair in the locket was matched to Annie’s hair, and from then on she was able to lead a
life
of luxury with her own carriage and servants to tend her every whim.

Biddy had always felt that Annie was a cut above herself and Mrs Martindale. She felt no rancour about this. Breeding would out any old day. Look how Mr Armstrong had taken to her, always teasing and talking with her, just as if he knew that deep down the pair of them came out of the same drawer. He’d never once asked Biddy to sit with him in his room, driving old Nellie mad. Biddy could quite see why. She hadn’t a ladylike bone in her body – her own mother was always telling her that. ‘You’d think you’d been dragged up instead of fetched up,’ she was always saying.

Maybe if the story came true and Annie did turn up at the door swathed in velvet and fur, Mr Armstrong would take one look and fall madly in love with her. Seeing her for the first time as the aristocratic personage she really was. Personage … Biddy liked the sound of that word a lot. Mrs Martindale was a person. Biddy was a person. But Annie was a personage. Definitely.

One warm day when skylarks were singing high above the fields, a fox got into the outhouse and bit the heads off a newborn litter of kittens. The animal doctor sat up for two nights running, trying to nurse the grieving mother cat back to a semblance of normality.

Biddy thought he looked shocking and said so. ‘He’s not been the same since Annie Clancy went,’ she said unwisely. ‘I think he misses her. They were just getting really thick when she went.’

‘Getting thick?’ Nellie’s neck flushed up like a scald. ‘What an expression! You’re beginning to talk like those magazines you read.’

‘I might go and see Annie when I have my weekend off.’ Biddy spread a layer of jam on a slice of bread. ‘I’d like to know how she’s getting on.’

‘She’s not at home,’ Nellie said too quickly.

‘Where, then?’

‘I don’t know. And I don’t
want
to know.’

All at once Nellie made a snap decision. She knew Biddy Baker. The stupid girl would make a mystery out of nothing. Once she got her teeth into anything she never let go. Wiser to shut her up once and for all.

‘I wasn’t going to tell you this …’ Biddy sat up straight, both ears flapping. ‘… but the truth is that Annie blotted her copy book good and proper the night before she left. That was why she went in such a hurry without saying a decent goodbye.’

‘What did she do?’ Biddy held her breath, hoping for the worst. ‘She was in Mr Armstrong’s room till late, wasn’t she?’

‘Exactly.’ Nellie nodded her small head up and down three times. ‘Exactly.’

Biddy put a hand to her mouth. ‘You mean she … they …?’

Nellie put up a hand. ‘We don’t talk about things like that. Especially at the table. Suffice to say that after that night Annie had no choice left to her but to leave in disgrace.’

‘You mean
she
seduced
him
?’ Biddy could hardly bear the excitement. ‘An’ he spurned her so that to save her face she had to go?’ Her eyes were as round as pinwheels. ‘An’ all the time he thinks it was his fault and he’s no better than one of the animals he tends. An’ why he’s so bad-tempered and why he doesn’t go to Manchester any more to see his fancy piece?’

‘That will do! I’ve got my palpitations coming on again, and is it any wonder?’ Nellie got up and held a hand to her fat bosom. ‘I think I’ll go for a lie down.’

Biddy went straight into the room at the end of the long hall. She couldn’t get over it. Annie and Mr Armstrong, slaking their passion on the horse-hair sofa … She sat down and stroked its shiny prickly surface. The thought was so beautiful she could hardly bear it. She rocked herself to and fro, imagining …

Seth, from force of habit, made straight for the fire
when
he came in and the face Biddy turned to him was so vacant, so filled with longing, he asked her if she felt ill. If she did, then of course she must go up to her room until she felt better.

Biddy found it hard to close her mouth. How handsome he was. How romantic his profile. What a beautiful couple he and Annie would make. She slid from the sofa and backed towards the door.

‘Mrs Martindale and me were talking about Annie Clancy earlier on,’ she said, watching his face for the slightest hint of emotion. ‘Mrs Martindale says Annie never went home.’

He turned away so fast Biddy could only guess his expression.

‘And does Mrs Martindale know where she is now?’

Surely his voice shook? Biddy felt a prickle up her spine. ‘She says not, sir.’ She slipped round the door. ‘I’m very sorry, sir.’

Seth stared hard at the door after Biddy had closed it behind her, then wrenched it open, calling down the hall in a voice that had Biddy all of a tremble.

‘Mrs Martindale! Will you come here, please?’

In the kitchen Biddy clasped her hands together across her disappointingly flat chest. He was fired with thwarted passion – it was there, in his whole manner. Mrs Martindale
did
know where Annie was. Biddy hadn’t been born yesterday. Nor the day before that, neither. The old bag knew something she was keeping to herself.

‘Annie Clancy!’ Seth went straight into the attack. ‘Why didn’t you tell me where she is?’

Nellie turned her head towards the door as if she sensed someone listening outside. ‘Who said …’ Her eyes were wary. ‘I never …’

‘I’ve found out exactly where she is!’ Seth lied, his voice entirely devoid of emotion. ‘All I want to know is if she’s happy there?’

‘She’s all right, sir.’

‘You’ve heard from her?’ Seth sat down at his desk, picked up a paper-weight and held it lightly in one hand. ‘Is she well?’

Nellie swallowed. ‘Quite well, sir.’

‘Kind to her, are they?’

‘Oh, yes, sir.’ The soft rhythm of the conversation had Nellie bemused. ‘Lily Eccles is a second cousin of mine. She …’

The desk chair was sent spinning as Seth sprang to his feet. ‘Lily Eccles? Barney Eccles’s wife?’

Too late Nellie realised she’d been taken in. Mr Armstrong hadn’t known where Annie was, and now he looked ready to throw the glass paper-weight at her. She clenched her hands, turned and walked with controlled dignity out into the hall.

Seth started after her, then stopped. He had to get a hold of himself first before he shook her or slapped her thin sallow face. Barney Eccles! A sharp pain stabbed at the side of his head. There wasn’t a woman this side of fifty safe from the hill farmer’s groping, filthy hands. Sitting down again at his desk he buried his head in his hands.

And he’d
been
there! Back in April. He had stood with Barney in that filthy yard, itching to get away once he’d seen to the cow. And all the time Annie was there, somewhere in the house, or out in the fields. Living with that awful woman and her sticky brood.

He remembered too the inexplicable ache of sadness as he’d ridden away. As though he was being called back.

Suddenly he hurled the paper-weight at the stone fireplace, striding from the room as it splintered into tiny pieces.

‘What have you been saying to Mr Armstrong?’ Nellie Martindale was breathing as fast as if she’d run a mile.

Biddy feigned total amazement. ‘Me? Mr Armstrong?’ She opened her eyes wide at the housekeeper, who looked as white as a sheet. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Whatever Mrs Martindale had been going to say was left unsaid as the kitchen door slammed back so hard that little flakes of plaster dropped from the ceiling.