The Travelling Man (34 page)

‘What!’ Dorothea leaned back in her chair, presenting the flat plains of her face to the ceiling. ‘Take more than a splash or two of dew to make us even passable, but you should have seen the May Queen in her long white dress leaping round the Maypole. Pity she was in foal.’

Annie sat up and clutched her side. ‘You shouldn’t make me laugh. It hurts.’

A little colour had come into the pale cheeks and Dorothea was well pleased, though she didn’t think that what she had said was as funny as all that.

‘Abigail found a fox cub no more than a couple of weeks old. She’s got it hidden in the barn in a cardboard box teaching it to drink milk from a saucer like a cat. If our father finds out he’ll go raving mad. He’s lost half his chickens to one of its relatives. I’ll go now.’ She stood up, her duty done. ‘Seth’s downstairs having tea. He’ll be coming up to see how you are any time now.’

She missed the blush staining Annie’s cheeks. The subtleties of blossoming relationships between men and women were lost on Dorothea. Naîve to the point of immaturity, she was happy to lollop her way through life skimming the surface of emotional involvements. She liked Annie for the simple reason that it would have been too much bother to dislike her.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

She crashed the door to behind her and Annie heard her clomping down the stairs, making more noise than a herd of overweight elephants.

‘You’re better,’ Seth said, coming in without knocking.

‘As right as rain,’ Annie agreed. ‘I’m getting up this evening, then tomorrow I’m going downstairs.’

‘In a few weeks’ time you’re coming back with me.’

‘I’m going back to the cottage. It’s been cleared up, they’ve told me.’

‘You’re never going back to the cottage. I’ll see to that.’

‘You?’ Annie winced with pain as she twisted round too quickly. ‘How can
you
say what I do, or what I don’t do?’

‘Because I’m responsible for you.’

She could hardly believe the things he was saying, standing there with his arms folded and his mouth set in a grim line. If it wouldn’t hurt so much she would laugh.

He hadn’t finished either. ‘I made myself responsible for you when my horse knocked you down. I let Mrs Martindale make a fool of me. I should have known that you weren’t such a little prude as to run away from me on account of one kiss.’ He glared at her. ‘A pretty chaste kiss into the bargain.’

He was making a total mess of what he had planned to say. Annie looked so awful sitting straight up in bed with her face a mottled yellow shading to purple beneath her eyes, and her mouth slipping to one side where the cuts had still to heal.

‘Biddy misses you. She says the fun went out of the house when you left.’ He nodded, well satisfied with his reasoning. ‘She can act as chaperone between us, if that’s what’s bothering you.’

Annie’s face was a study. ‘Chaperone? So you think we’d need a chaperone?’

‘Only till we’re married.’

Annie’s mouth dropped open, but it was so painful that she closed it again.

‘Oh, my dear …’ He came to sit on the edge of the
bed
. ‘When I think of my chance meeting with Dailey up on the fells … when I think of what might have happened if I hadn’t come across him …’ He took her hand. ‘There have been shadows in my life for a long time now, but when you were in my house they somehow went away.’ Lifting her hand he gently kissed her swollen fingers. ‘Come back with me and banish them again. Soon.’

‘Marry you?’ Her voice was tinged with disbelief. ‘Did I hear you say that? I can’t marry you, Mr Armstrong.’

He made a gesture of impatience. Couldn’t she see that he hardly knew what he was saying? That never once, since his wife died her self-inflicted death, had he allowed his emotions to show. He frowned and turned his head away, so that all she saw was his profile.

‘Yes, you must marry me,’ he whispered. ‘Oh, damn you! Do you have to look at me like that? Come back as a skivvy if that’s what you want! Come back merely to wash and iron my blasted shirts. But just come back!’

If she hadn’t looked so frail, so vulnerable, so touchingly fragile, he would have taken her in his arms and kissed the startled look from her face. Instead he stood up, well away from the bed, folded his arms and shouted at her.

‘Can’t you call me Seth? Is that too much to ask?’

‘I’m not coming back with you …’ she hesitated ‘… Seth.’

‘Why? For God’s sake, why?’

‘Because I’ve planned the way things are going to be from now on.’ She spoke with difficulty through her swollen lips. ‘At first I wasn’t going to accept Adam’s money, but Mrs Gray made me see that if I refused it I would be insulting his memory because he wanted me to have it.’ Her chin lifted. ‘I have a gift for dressmaking, a real God-given gift. The girls actually wear the dresses I’ve made for them, when they see I’m not trying to make them look ridiculous in frills and flounces. With Adam’s money I could have a shop with my name above it.
Annie
Clancy
. Modes!
’ Her eyes shone. ‘It’s a fortune. With money like that you can do anything. So you don’t need to bother about me any more. For the first time I’m going to be able to stand on my own feet.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Without a man promising me, terrifying me, demanding of me what I haven’t got to give, expecting things of me. Bothering me!’

‘Into which of those flattering categories have you fitted me?’

Before she could answer he walked to the door, banged it behind him, making her wince as the sound set her head throbbing.

‘A
fortune
? Eighty pounds?’

Seth stormed into the drawing-room where Margot sat dispensing tea from the silver spirit kettle, pouring it into egg-shell thin china cups rimmed with gold.

‘How long would eighty pounds last if her little venture fails? As it surely will! I could tell her she’d be on a safer bet renting a corner shop selling meat and potato pies, oatmeal, paraffin and parched peas.’ He waved the proffered cup of tea impatiently away. ‘She must be out of her mind. For God’s sake, Margot, who knows better than she that it’s the pawnbroker’s shop that’s indispensable in the mill towns. Modes? From where did she coin an expression like that? From you?’

Margot stopped fluttering her be-ringed hands among the tea things. Once Seth had told her he could watch her doing just that indefinitely, but today she had to accept that she was wasting her time, and it badly irritated her.

‘Not a shop as such. More a discreet establishment where ladies can go to choose their own material from swatches.’

‘From what?’

‘Swatches. Small samples of cloth.’ Margot demonstrated with her hands, showing their approximate length and breadth. ‘The clients can be measured and
fitted
and Annie will help them choose the kind of thing which suits them.’ She smoothed down the skirt of her lilac silk afternoon gown. ‘Lancashire women have good taste, given the money, of course. I don’t expect many of them wear clogs and shawls from choice.’ She sighed and took a dainty sip of tea. ‘Annie was brought up in poverty, so she knows how to achieve the maximum effect with the minimum outlay. She’ll be a tremendous success. I don’t blame her for turning down whatever you had to offer.’ If she hadn’t known him better she could have sworn he was going to hit her. ‘And don’t go marching hell for leather out of here!’ Her voice stayed him. ‘I expect you proposed to her as if you were doing her a great big favour.’ Her head went to one side. ‘Well? Did you? Am I right?’

Seth stared at her for a moment, then actually beat his forehead with a clenched fist.

‘It was when she was so ill … it was during the long hours I sat beside her bed. That was when I offered her my life, promised to cherish her for ever.’

‘When she was unconscious?’

He lowered his head.

‘And now, just now, upstairs, you talked as if it was a
fait accompli
?’

‘I’ll come back another day,’ Seth muttered, striding from the room. ‘Today I only make things worse.’

‘Are we taking young Annie to France with us?’ Harry came straight to the point. ‘I’ve just bumped into Armstrong looking jealous as hell. Doesn’t he want the lass to go?’

Margot picked up the heavy teapot. ‘No. I don’t think taking Annie with us would be a good idea at all,’ she said firmly, thumping the pot back on its stand, making her mind up swiftly at that very moment, wondering why she’d ever considered it in the first place.

Harry wasn’t surprised. He knew this dearly loved second wife of his very well. Knew that she had been
thoroughly
spoilt by fond and doting parents, so that in maturity she took up causes which interested and amused her, indulged herself with them for a little while, then dropped them when she became tired and bored. Annie Clancy had served her purpose. She had interested Margot at a time when she needed to be interested, and now could be discarded just as easily.

‘So what do we do with her now we’ve finished with her?’

Margot had no idea she was being laughed at. She passed a fragile cup and saucer over to him, trying not to feel too annoyed at the way the tea was drunk at one gulp. ‘She can stay here of course till we go away, and until she feels strong enough to …’ the plump hands made vague circular motions in the air ‘… take up the threads of her life.’

‘Do you think she’ll marry Seth?’

A shrug of the plump shoulders. ‘How should I know? After what has happened to her, she may never trust a man again. Never be able to surrender herself completely.’ Margot yawned. ‘I’m not too sure that a dress salon would be the right idea. Seth was quick to remind me that Lancashire mill towns are not in the least like Paris.’

She actually said ‘Paree’. Harry downed a second cup of tea just as speedily. It was always the same. When she tired of anything she became more French than the Eiffel Tower; it was a way of detracting attention from what she was saying. It signified that in spirit she had removed herself from a tiresome situation.

‘
Mon Dieu
!’ she said now. ‘Can that be ze time?’

Harry was troubled.

If Annie wasn’t to marry Armstrong, then what to do with her? She was back in the sewing-room stitching what looked like acres of flimsy stuff into frocks for the girls to wear in the heat of Menton. Margot seemed to think that the lass would go back home, but from
what
he’d gathered there wasn’t all that much of a home to go to.

‘So you’re not going into business, lass?’ Standing by the window in the sewing-room, his massive bulk almost blocked out the light. ‘Mrs Gray tells me the bank has advised you against.’

Annie put down the fine lawn neck-shawl she was hemming. ‘If I had the premises and the goodwill, the money Adam left me would be ample to start me off with all I needed, but I haven’t got either.’

‘You could always go home.’

She shook her head. ‘When I left my father’s house I left it for good.’

Harry was flummoxed. Margot had told him that Annie’s father had turned her out, and he hadn’t been able to credit it. But now, looking at her sitting there with her hair tucked into a white cap, wearing a blue print frock with a white collar at the neck, she was a picture for sore eyes. How could any man banish a daughter like this from his door? My God, with a daughter like this a man should go down on his knees every day and thank the Lord for heaping such a blessing on him. She wasn’t afraid of hard work, either. Just look at her now, sewing away as if her life depended on it. Fourteen hours she put in some days, he’d been told, straining her eyes just so his wife and two daughters could go to France all dolled up in the latest fashion. Just so they could hold their own.

‘Will the cottage be empty when you go to France, sir?’

Goddamn it, she’d read his thoughts. Harry cleared his throat. ‘’Fraid not. The couple move into it next week. The gardens have to be kept up while we’re away.’

He stomped from the room before he found himself explaining to her about his problems with staffing, with the harvesting, with the animals while he was absent. He marched briskly across the tiled hall. No wonder
Armstrong
wanted to marry her. That lass had a wisdom, a strength, that went far beyond her years. It was the way she looked at you with those steady blue eyes, not a bold look, certainly not that, but a look of untutored intelligence that said she would understand if you confided in her.

He walked out on to the terrace. One of his favourite gun dogs had got out while in season. Producing her litter had almost finished her off. Now the sheer weight and volume of milk was making it impossible for her to walk. Something would have to be done.

Harry looked back at the tall window of the sewing-room. He reckoned a visit from the animal doctor was definitely on the agenda.

The men were at work with their rakes and pitch-forks when Annie left the house to walk along the meadow paths. The grasses bordering the brook had flowered; elder flowers bloomed in the place of whitethorn in the hedges; a skylark sang high above the bales of hay.

She no longer bore much resemblance to the girl in the greasy flat cap and the long woollen cloak who had trudged the roads looking for a place of work. The long night bound hand and foot to the chair in Adam’s cottage had wiped the bright girlish expression from her face. Now she was fine-boned and achingly thin; her dark blue eyes had a wary look about them, and she kept her long red hair pulled tightly back from her face, tucked up into a serving-maid’s white cap.

The men had gone home and the air was sticky and warm. Her dress clung to her back in damp patches. Over to the west a dark spiral of cloud curled across the sky threatening wind and rain. If it came the bales would have to be balanced against each other, to stop them from getting soaked through.

Annie raised her eyes to the changing sky and prayed that the rain would hold off. Lifting her skirts and bowing her head as if the rain had already begun, she ran
back
through the meadow, across the paddock and into the house by the back way, failing to look up and see Seth Armstrong framed in the window of the sewing-room. Waiting for her.