The Travelling Man (30 page)

Annie left the letter where it was, in the brown teapot, but she thought about it often as she sat with her sewing at the big house. What she had expected she didn’t know, but every word was as cold and unfeeling as Edith Morris herself.

‘She would run a mile if a man looked twice at her,’ she told Adam, liking to make him smile.

‘From how you’ve described her I don’t think there’s much danger of a man looking at her
once
,’ Adam said, quick as a lick.

Annie could see he was getting over the shock of his wife’s death nicely. She expected he was forgetting as well as regretting the proposal of marriage he’d made to her when still in deep grief. The arrangement of working afternoons up here in the comfortable sewing-room at the top of the big house was going well, now she had made Adam understand she wouldn’t be bullied.

Annie folded her sewing and put it away for the next day. Dorothea was going to look splendid in the black velvet evening gown with the satin inlets in the puffed sleeves, in spite of the fact that she’d fidgeted and grumbled through every fitting. She was down there in the stable yard giving her horse its daily strapping, talking to a man who straightened up from his examination of the horse’s foot, looked up at the window and gave Annie a curt nod of his head.

She turned away at once, but not before she was sure she’d seen a flash of mockery in the strangely light eyes.

Seth caught up with her as she walked back to the cottage down the long, winding drive.

‘Everything all right, Annie?’

‘Perfectly all right, thank you.’

‘You’re looking very tired.’

‘That’s because I’m busy.’ She tried to walk on, but it was no use. He seemed determined to annoy her.

‘You don’t look all that happy to me.’

Annie was so angry she could have hit him. He had folded his arms, planted his feet wide apart, and was staring intently at her with his eyes narrowed.

‘Having any more trouble with that ear?’

Annie’s face flamed. ‘I hear what I want to hear.’

‘Your eyes are red. Maybe you should be wearing glasses for such close work.’

Was he serious? Did he really think he had the right to talk to her like this?

‘I’m perfectly healthy,’ she told him. ‘I don’t need glasses nor an ear trumpet. I suggest you keep your concern for those who appreciate and would benefit from it. Like Mr Gray’s horses, or his pigs. And now, if you’ll stand aside …’

She walked on, more than a little pleased with the way she’d dealt with that, but instead of going into the cottage she turned off the winding drive into a narrow field path, lifting her skirts clear of the mud-filled ruts where the shire horses had been exercised. She kicked a stone out of her way. She was tired and on edge, and her eyes ached from the strain of working on the black velvet.

Opening the gate and closing it carefully behind her, she walked along a barely visible path until she came to a small hump-backed bridge over what had once been a gravel pit. The long valley spread out before her, all in differing shades of green. The countryside, the real countryside with distant woods, so dense they were almost black, a meandering river lit to silver by the unusually strong light, all bisected by twisting ribbons of dry stone walls. The mines with their steep little streets of dark huddled houses and slag heaps seemed a million miles away.

Annie thought of her father, of Georgie and the four younger boys. All destined to work underground like moles, hardly seeing the light of day, never realising that all this beauty even existed.

How could Seth Armstrong suggest that she wasn’t happy, when he had no idea of how it had been for
her
before he found her wandering the fells that dark winter’s night?

She turned, and taking what she imagined was a short cut walked straight into a bramble thicket, with thorns that dragged at her dress. It would have been easier and far more sensible to turn back and retrace her steps over the bridge, but Annie’s mood was for fighting on, for finding her own way, for getting her bearings once she was free of the brambles. She was sure that if she skirted that wood, crossed that thread of a steam, picking her way over the two flat stepping-stones, she would be back at the cottage within minutes.

But when she climbed the long slope of a hill she looked down on a wide expanse of heathered wastes broken by isolated heaps of stone ruins. She looked up at the sky. She had no idea of how far she had walked, whether she had gone in circles or in a direct route away from the cottage. Town bred, she had none of the countryman’s inborn instinct for survival, but surely it made sense to turn her back on that wild stretch of moorland and retrace her steps as far as possible?

She remembered a true story told to her by her mother years ago. A pitman, walking the hills one Sunday in summer, lost his way in a mist, fell down a gully and lay there for seven days and eight nights before being found by a search party. Still alive, but completely insane, his finger nails worn away in his frantic struggles to climb out.

Annie could see no sign of any creeping mist, but she was sure she could feel it in her bones. In March anything could happen – rain, snow, high winds, and days like today of pleasant warmth. There were signs of rabbits all around; purple violets flowered beneath a straggling hedge, but at any minute now she could be enveloped in a dank white curling mist, as lost as if she wandered alone on the far plains of the moon. Her next sliding, slipping steps brought her to a sudden totally unexpected clearing edged by the thick scrub and
bramble
bushes she remembered earlier. Sure now that the way back lay straight ahead of her she picked up her skirts and fought her way as carefully as her rising panic would allow her through the tangled undergrowth.

When she heard the soft murmur of voices she stopped, a hand to her heart. For the past hour the only sound she had heard had been the bleat of a lone wandering sheep. It had seemed as if she would never hear a human voice again. She listened, not moving, standing quite still. Yes, there it was again, a muffled voice, followed by a scream of what sounded like a lighthearted protest. Moving cautiously, Annie edged forward.

The voices came, it seemed, from down the hill, carrying up to her, borne on the wind. Moving out into a sudden clearing, she looked down on a sight that brought a swift rush of colour to her face and started a trembling in her legs.

Lying on a dark brown blanket of bracken was Johnson, the parlour maid, with the handyman, Kit Dailey, straddled across her. His bare legs and buttocks shockingly white against the bracken. Deep in the throes of his passion his movements were rhythmic, fast and thrusting. Johnson was moaning, turning her head from side to side, her long, blue-black hair loosed from its neat bun.

Annie froze, stifled a cry by pressing fingers across her mouth, sank down on her knees on the hard stubbled grass. It was Laurie Yates all over again, groaning as he laboured in uncontrollable passion in the back room of her father’s house. It was the realisation of what her father would have seen if he had come in through the door. It was the pain again, her sore back pressed down hard into the straw mattress; it was the feeling that she was being torn in two.

She got up, moved too quickly and dislodged a stone, a large stone which clattered and bounced its way down the slope.

‘What the …?’

Johnson’s face was a mask of stunned disbelief. As the handyman scrabbled for his trousers, his voice was a bellowing shout of rage.

‘Annie Clancy! Of all the dirty little tykes! Of all the scum!
Watching
us, for God’s sake! Up there snooping. Watching. Holy mother of God, I’ll kill you for this!’

‘I wasn’t …’ Annie knew this was no time for explanations; knew she wouldn’t be believed anyway. Kit was hopping on one foot as he buttoned himself up, ready to come after her, while Johnson, hair flying, was already crossing the stream on her way up the hill.

But Annie was away, running as fast as she could across the uneven ground, mouth open, stumbling and falling, getting up and running on again. The inference that she had been watching horrified and sickened her. Those two had had it in for her since that first day. She had seen the look of undiluted hatred on the parlour maid’s face. And Kit Dailey was just as bad. They made no secret of their dislike for her.

Annie was at the crest of a hill now. Over a ridge of trees she saw the familiar outline of chimneys. Sure that she was not being followed, she slowed down a little; as she saw the cottage in the distance, she began to run.

Adam was watching for her by the window. She could see him standing there, and the way he moved quickly away when he saw her coming. He had lit the lamp, tended the fire and the kettle was set to boil on the hob.

Gasping for breath, shaking with fear and disgust – how could they have thought she was up there on the hill watching them – Annie lifted the sneck on the cottage door and half fell inside.

Adam was there, kindly sturdy Adam, a father holding out loving arms to his child. In that moment he was the kind of father she had never had, one who would pat her troubles away and wipe the tears from her face.

Adam let her cry, knowing that whatever had distressed her so was best released in the bout of frenzied weeping. He stroked her hair, lifted it away from her neck. He tightened an arm about her, feeling her softness against him. Her hair was all mussed where he had touched it. She was damp and sweet-smelling and he could bear it no more.

‘Annie … oh, Annie …’

He had meant to kiss her gently as he raised her face to his, but her eyes were tender with tears, she was looking at him with such feeling, the touch of her lips flamed his desire.

For Annie, it was as if the whole of her face was being swallowed up in a prickly thicket of hair, tobacco-smelling hair. His teeth were hard against her lips as he strained her to him, holding her with a strength that took the breath from her body. It came to her in that moment that no man had ever touched her gently, with tenderness, and without this greedy wanting.

She pushed him away from her so roughly, her strength matching his own, that he stumbled against a chair which gave against his weight and skitted across the floor. Somehow he kept his balance and would have reached for her again, but the expression in her eyes rooted him to the spot.

‘Stay away from me!’

To his horror she picked up the lamp from the table and held it high above her head. He held out both hands, shaking his head from side to side.

‘Annie! Annie, love, I don’t want to hurt you. I would never hurt you.’ He moved forward, only to step back as she swung the lamp high in an arc above her head.

‘I mean it, Adam. Touch me again like that and I’ll let fly. I will! I’m not pretending.’

Groping behind him for the armrests, Adam slowly lowered himself into his chair. ‘Do I disgust you as much as all that, lass?’There were tears in his eyes. ‘As much as all that?’

Annie lowered the lamp to the table. He wasn’t to know that it was the humiliation, the terror of what might have happened if Kit Dailey had caught up with her that had wakened the violence in her. It was seeing them, it was them thinking that she … it was Adam comforting her … she shuddered. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

Because she rushed over to the slopstone and had her back turned to him she saw nothing of the heartbreak creeping across the gardener’s weather-beaten face.

‘I won’t bother you again, lass,’ she heard him whisper.

When she turned round he was gone.

It took Harry Gray and his willing band of searchers four days to find him.

Adam, who knew the fells as well as his own back garden, had fallen down a long gully, broken both his legs and died there, face down on the dry and dusty bed.

They brought him back to the cottage, and two days later he was buried beside his wife in the old churchyard.

The weather had changed, and as the mourners walked back across the fields a sudden crack of thunder sent hailstones bouncing, while a gale from the west flattened the unseasonable daffodils in the flower beds that had been Adam’s pride and joy.

‘
WELL, THEN. IT
looks as if everything is settled, Annie.’ Margot Gray nodded her head and smiled at her husband. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Harry? Annie can stay at the cottage till the new man and his wife work out their
notice
at their old place, then she moves in here on a permanent basis.’

Annie sat quietly, looking from one to the other, listening half-heartedly. Mrs Gray was being so kind, so generous, appearing not to notice that her husband was edging towards the door, eager to be outside with his dogs and his horses.

‘You agree with that, dear.’

It was a statement, not a question, and it was Annie’s turn to pretend not to be noticing when the big man in his checked jacket glanced over at her and closed an eye in a broad wink.

‘Anything you say, my dear.’ Harry felt behind him for the door handle. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me …’ With a slam of the door he was gone. Annie heard the clump of his boots down the tiled hall and his bark of a voice calling out to someone to fetch his gun.

Margot smiled. She knew exactly what plans she had for this small flame-haired girl sitting on the edge of her chair, both hands clasped together in her lap. But as ever, she wanted Harry to think that the plans had been his idea. She had sensed a long time ago that the yelling, bullying manner hid an ego as fragile as an egg-shell. So, all the decisions were his – at least he believed so. The half of Margot that was French knew how to make a man happy, and still get her own way. Arguments, pouts, petulance, sulks were for other women, not her. She turned her full attention on Annie, one plump hand tapping on the arm of her chair as if to hurry her words along.

‘Mr Gray’s lawyer friend has everything in hand, Annie. With Adam’s clear instructions in the letter he left behind, the money should come through in no time.’

‘I don’t want it, Mrs Gray.’

Margot ignored that. ‘These things take time, and the most important thing was to take the money from its hiding-place and deposit it in the bank. You were right and very honest to tell me about it. Adam took a great
risk
in leaving it there. People talk, rumours grow and though he was a good and decent man, he did have a reputation as a miser.’