The Travelling Man (25 page)

Slowly she went back downstairs, her face set in lines of determination. Why should she walk out like she’d walked out of her father’s house, out of Mr Armstrong’s house, away from Barney Eccles’s farm, to wander the roads like a tramp woman? Mr Page wouldn’t touch her, not now she’d got his measure, not since she’d seen the expression on his wind-burned face as he’d tipped the bag of sovereigns into her lap. Money was his god, always had been and always would be. She greased the tins before dusting them with flour. But her mind wasn’t on what she was doing.

Her mind was on the hat she was going to buy from the hat market in Blackburn. It was also on the dress, the first dress she would ever have chosen for herself. White, she thought, remembering reading in one of Biddy’s magazines that white was the only colour for
an
unmarried girl to wear. Annie nodded her head up and down furiously. That was exactly what she was – in spite of Laurie Yates and his promise. She was eighteen years old, only just eighteen. An’ she was going to have a dress that fitted her properly. Tight over the bodice and hips, with a little jacket pleated into a basque and a flat bow at the back, only a bow, because the bustle was old fashioned now.

It had said in one of Biddy’s magazines that a fish-tail skirt was popular down in London. There had been a picture of one, tight-fitting right down to the ankle. The mannequins showing them off had to wear an ankle chain to stop them from taking too big a stride and splitting! And underneath they wore a chamois leather narrow petticoat so their knees could only move an inch at a time.

Biddy had nearly bust herself laughing when Annie had demonstrated how she imagined the mannequins would be forced to walk, wiggling her way down the hall taking tiny mincing steps. Annie’s mouth set hard as she remembered Mr Armstrong coming in the front door and grinning at the sight of her.

She dismissed that memory with a narrowing of her eyes. Seth Armstrong was no better than the rest, and maybe worse, because he had pretended to care.

When Adam came in from work his meal was ready and waiting for him as usual. Annie told him that she accepted the five sovereigns, thank you very much, and suggested he paid her four shillings a week, to be back-dated to two weeks after the day she arrived.

‘Do you think I’m bow-legged wi’ brass?’ he wanted to know, as she slid a nice helping of plum pie in front of him, but she knew he would give in.

‘An’ we won’t mention the other matter, Mr Page?’

‘You’re a hard woman, Annie Clancy.’

‘I know.’

‘An’ you’ll stop on?’

‘If you agree to what I’ve just said.’

He took a slice of buttered new bread from the plate and folded it in two with an angry movement. ‘By heck, Annie, you drive a hard bargain.’ But the light was back in his brown eyes.

She knew she had won.

During the night the dog was sick and when he tried to follow Adam to the door, his legs buckled beneath him. For four days he refused his food, lying on a sack by the fire with glazed eyes, his coat as dull as the ashes in the pan Annie carried out each morning to the midden.

Adam cornered Harry Gray down by the stables and asked if he could take half a day off work to wheel the dog in a barrow across the field to Seth Armstrong’s place ‘It’s serious this time, Mester. Yon dog’s never been off his food for as long as this.’

Harry Gray had a habit of addressing his outdoor workers over a shoulder as he walked away from them. ‘I’ll do better than that, Adam. I’ve a horse needs looking at and my wife was only saying last night that it’s time we had Armstrong over to dinner. I’ll get a message to him today.’

When Adam told Annie that he’d managed to get her a ride into town with the carrier for the next morning she was delighted, but when he told her that Seth Armstrong was coming to look at the dog, her smile vanished as rapidly as if an Indian rubber had been taken to it.

‘You don’t think much of him, then?’

Annie nodded towards the basket in front of the fire where the dog slept, a twitching, pain-filled sleep. ‘If anyone can make him better Mr Armstrong can. Biddy said he had the healing touch in his hands.’

‘Biddy?’

‘The girl who worked for him.’

‘I never saw no Biddy the last time I was over there. I saw that weasel-faced housekeeper of his, and I saw you.’

Annie neatly side-stepped his outstretched hand and walked out into the garden. The late afternoon sun warmed the leaves to russet-gold, and there was the scent of wood-smoke in the air. Annie turned as usual to look back at the cottage.

She must have been more than a bit doolally to think that the gardener would be willing to carry on treating her like a daughter. He’d started trimming his moustache and combing his thick brown hair, and today he’d brought a great bunch of michaelmas daisies inside and watched her arrange them in a copperjug, never taking his eyes off her. Twice last week he’d come up behind her when she was at the slopstone, so close that she’d felt his breath on her neck. Once she’d imagined that he had touched her hair, and known that one small step backwards would have brought her close up against him. She shook her head from side to side. Why hadn’t she realised, long before he spoke out, that he was getting ideas? Why had she believed he was old enough to know better?

‘Men!’ she said aloud, sounding so much like Edith Morris that if she’d recognised the resemblance for herself she would have burst out laughing.

She was glad she wouldn’t be there when Mr Armstrong came the next day. Meeting her again would be a terrible embarrassment to both of them. ‘Annie Clancy!’ he’d say, pretending he was so happy to see her again. ‘So this is where you got to!’

Just as if he’d never talked to her till midnight, set her tongue wagging with a glass of wine at times, told her his life story, a real sob story, thinking he was softening her up for what he had in mind. Just as if he had never gone to Eccles’s farm, knowing she was there but never asking after her. Riding away down the hill on his black horse in that silly black hat.

Annie walked slowly back down the path. Oh, yes. She was glad all right that she wouldn’t be there when the animal doctor called the next day.

SETH ALWAYS HATED
telling a man that his dog would have to be put down. Some men openly wept, while others pretended they had expected it anyway, agreeing that it was for the best.

The gardener’s expression was hard to read. ‘I knew he was bad, Mr Armstrong. His age goes against him, doesn’t it?’

Seth nodded, explaining that the form of dropsy Rex was suffering from was abdominal, an obstruction of the liver.

‘But you can treat him, Mr Armstrong?’

‘If he was a young dog, yes. I’d suggest two to five grains of calomel a week, and show you how to rub his right side here, from the last rib to the hip with embrocation, but …’ Seth stroked the dog’s face. ‘I only wish there was some way, but it would be cruel to put him through so much suffering for nothing. He’s very jaundiced, Adam.’

Adam Page was looking so different from the last time Seth called as to be almost unrecognisable. Then his shirt had food stains down its button-trim, with the muffler knotted loosely round his neck as stringy as a frayed piece of rope. The cottage was different, too. Now the brasses gleamed, the hearth was swept, and from the appetising smell Seth guessed that a piece of meat was slowly cooking in its own juices.

‘You’ve trimmed your beard,’ he said, trying to give the silent man time to think.

‘Aye.’

‘You’ve got everything looking very nice in here.’

‘Aye.’

‘You’ve obviously got help in since your wife died?’

‘Aye.’

As Seth bent over the dog again, stroking its face and ears, the dry nose nuzzled itself into the palm of his hand.

‘It’s the kindest way, Adam.’

‘I know that, Mr Armstrong.’

‘Well then …?’

Margot Gray listened gravely as Seth told her about the gardener’s dog. She was sorry, of course, but an animal was just an animal when all was said and done. Not a human being, for God’s sake. Harry would see that a replacement was delivered to the cottage as soon as possible.

What she was more interested in was watching Seth’s face as he talked. His eyes were the kindest she had ever seen in a man, almost as if they had a light shining from behind them. His hair was as sun-bleached as if the sun shone down on it every day. Seth Armstrong was a beautiful man. Yes, that was the right word. But to use it to describe him didn’t mean that he was in the least effeminate. Mon Dieu, no! There was a strength in him that almost shouted at you. Quick-tempered, too. She had once seen him snatch the whip off a hired man out in the yard to put a stop to him beating a wretched dog into submission. He had snapped the whip in two as if it had been a mere twig.

She shifted her position on the couch, spreading her skirts more attractively about her. There was nothing more exciting than a handsome man who seemed to be totally unaware of the effect he had on women. A vain man was an abomination, but this man’s open, friendly attitude was almost an insult. Margot pouted. She might as well be another man, for heaven’s sake!

Seth was well aware that Margot Gray was flirting with him. She was waiting for a compliment on her appearance, and she’d get one in due course. They
always
played this game together when they met. If he hadn’t thought that her marriage was as solid as Pendle rock …

‘I can never quite decide on the colour of your eyes, Margot,’ he said. ‘Hazel? Amber? What colour would
you
say they were?’

Margot fluttered her eyelashes. ‘They are whatever colour you would like them to be,’ she whispered, tilting her head to avoid him noticing her double chin. ‘Seth, dear Seth. Why have you never married again?’

At once his expression darkened, so that she knew her light-hearted teasing had gone too far. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re so wasted, so terribly wasted …’

‘Is my wife proposing to you again?’ Harry rubbed his hands together as he came into the room, then held them out to the fire. ‘There was no need for you to bury Adam’s dog yourself, Seth old chap. If it was too upsetting for him you should have got one of the stable lads to do it.’ He turned his back to the fire, spread his legs wide. ‘Was he very cut up about it?’

Seth shook his head. ‘It was hard to say what he was feeling. He just wasn’t the same man. It must have something to do with the woman he’s got in to look after him. He looked spruce enough to attend a wedding.’

‘Perhaps he will be going to one before long.’ Margot held out a foot to admire the soft bronze sheen of the pointed-toed shoe. She paused for full dramatic effect. ‘His own.’

‘You mean that young lass?’ Harry laughed out loud. ‘But his wife’s only been dead for … Well, I’ll be danged!’ He moved to the bell-pull at the side of the fireplace. ‘He’s old enough to be a grandfather.’ He gave two tugs at the rope. ‘Not too early for a drink, is it, Armstrong?’

Margot sat forward, not wishing to let the subject go. ‘How old do you think the gardener is, Seth?’

‘Fifty-five? Sixty? It’s hard to tell with most of his face covered in hair.’

‘Early forties,’ Margot said triumphantly. ‘Try and picture him without the undergrowth, and you’ll have a different man altogether. Men with beards always look as if they’ve something to hide.’

Harry had lost interest, but Seth was grinning, enjoying Margot’s pleasure in her little bit of gossip. ‘The girl? What’s she like?’

‘A splendid little …’ Harry stopped in mid-sentence as a swarthy man carrying a silver tray with glasses on it came into the room. ‘Over there,’ he said, indicating a small table by the side of the fireplace. ‘And ask Johnson to come up and see to the fire. It needs more coal.’

Margot could see by the expression on Seth’s face that he couldn’t see why Harry didn’t take the tongs and lift the coal from the scuttle himself, instead of waiting for a maid to do it. That was one of the many things she liked about him. In spite of his obvious good breeding there wasn’t an ounce of snobbishness in him. When Johnson came in to tend the fire Margot saw the way his mouth tightened briefly and his eyes slid away from her struggle with a cob of coal too large for the tongs to take. Yet he wouldn’t intervene, not when he was a guest of the house. How petty and small-minded he must think they were.

‘I think I’ll pay a call on the gardener’s girl one of these days,’ she said, when Johnson had left the room. ‘She probably has no mother to advise her – I’ll talk to her …’

She looked at Seth to see how he was taking this, but he was engrossed in telling Harry something about a cow that had aborted itself twice. She got up and swept from the room, her skirts swishing out behind her.

True to her word, a week later she called at the gardener’s cottage. She was followed up the path by Kit Dailey, the handyman hired by her husband a year ago. A small dark man, he staggered a little beneath
the
weight of a huge cardboard box filled with jars of preserves.

Margot suspected that she had overdone the Lady Bountiful bit. She was no lady of the manor calling regularly at the cottages in the village wearing a floppy hat, knowing all the children by their names. It smacked of patronage to Margot; it seemed to her to be an intrusion into privacy, and she had told herself many times she would have no part in it. But the gardener’s girl intrigued her, had done so right from the beginning, and the box of preserves was a good excuse to meet and talk with her again.

‘Anyone at home?’ She pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The cottage was charming. Like a cottage in a fairy-tale illustration. The firelight set the brasses twinkling; the blue and white plates on the dresser gleamed as if newly glazed. A small hand sewing-machine stood at one end of the scrubbed table, with scraps of material scattered around. There was a paper of pins, a reel of cotton and a bigger one of white tacking thread. Over the back of a stand-chair a length of scarlet ribbon trailed to the floor.

‘Anyone at home?’ Margot walked to the foot of the stairs. ‘Are you there, Annie? It’s Margot Gray.’