The Trespass (8 page)

‘Mr Frith, I do not want you to “arrange” for me in that way. I understood from my mother before she died that my father had agreed that the money was to come to me as it was unlikely that I would marry. That it was mine.’

Mr Frith put his cup down firmly on the small table beside the chair, and stood.

‘Miss Cooper, if I may be blunt, nothing in the world is
yours.
Now I am, if you will excuse me, an extremely busy man. Your mother’s money is safe where it is and wisely invested and I do not think you should be worrying your pretty little head about matters that do not concern you. Your father will always provide for you of course, and should anything happen to him your brothers will do the same. Your father, as I say, always has your interests at heart: only the other day he and I were reminded that you were about to turn thirty – indeed I believe the day is today and I do give you my very best wishes. Your duty, Miss Cooper, is to make your father happy, and he in return takes all the worries of the world from your weaker shoulders. That is how it will continue. Now if you will excuse me…’ and he moved into the hall where the footman waited to hand him his hat.

‘A final word, Miss Cooper. It is a well-known fact, my dear, that women’s brains are smaller than men’s and should never be troubled by manly things.’

Mary flushed on her thirtieth birthday, the footman smirked very slightly as he opened the front door, and Mr Frith disappeared into the grey, hazy afternoon.

*   *   *

Harriet picked up her bonnet and a small basket.

‘I shall go for a walk,’ she said to her aunt and Augusta and Alice, who were sitting in the drawing room with the curtains partly drawn, looking exhausted.

‘Walk!’ repeated Aunt Lucretia in amazement.

‘Oh heavens!’ said Alice.

‘That is ridiculous,’ said Augusta.

Needlework sat untouched; all three of them were wearing gloves, to keep their hands white.

‘Unless of course there is something you wish me to do?’ added Harriet hurriedly.

Her aunt gave a limpid wave. ‘No, my dear.’ The clock ticked loudly and Aunt Lucretia sighed, picked up a fan decorated with bright flowers and fanned herself languidly. ‘We are only resting. Preparing ourselves for what is to come.’ Then she remembered her duty. ‘But I do not think a young girl should walk alone, it is not proper. We cannot spare one of the servants at the moment of course.’

‘I shall not go far, Aunt Lucretia,’ said Harriet.

‘It is not proper,’ repeated her aunt, but droopingly.

‘May I go, may I go, may I go?’ Asobel rushed into the room from nowhere with her own bonnet in her hand, ribbons trailing across the floor. ‘Let me come too, Harriet!’

‘Asobel!’ said Aunt Lucretia.

‘Asobel!’ said Augusta.

‘Asobel!’ said Alice.

‘Really Asobel, you are becoming more and more of a nuisance,’ said her mother. ‘It is too hot, you are not going with Harriet, you will lie down in the nursery and conserve your strength for the wedding day, or I shall not allow you to be a flowergirl at all. If Harriet means to be foolish that is her own business.’ And Aunt Lucretia lay back in the sofa in the darkened room and closed her eyes.

The little girl stood at the front porch waving disconsolately as Harriet became a smaller and smaller figure in the distance. She sat down on the steps in the sunshine and dejectedly plaited the ribbons of her bonnet. The voices of her mother and her sisters floated out from the drawing room.

‘I do not understand why Harriet is so
solemn,
’ Lucretia complained. ‘She used to be a perfectly pleasant little girl. It is as if she thinks she is better than us.’

Alice, too exhausted almost to speak as she lay among the cushions on the chaise longue, said, ‘But she is pretty, isn’t she? I expect she will easily find a husband.’

‘As if that is everything,’ said Augusta, who was hunched in the other corner of her mother’s sofa.

‘Augusta, do not sit like that, it will spoil your figure.’

‘Actually, Augy, you know finding a husband
is
everything,’ said Alice. ‘You just say things like that because it is me who is getting married and not you.’

‘That is ridiculous,’ said Augusta and immediately burst into tears and threw herself against the back of the sofa, spoiling her figure even more.

‘I shall go mad,’ cried Lucretia Cooper, ‘if you girls do not stop your endless bickering! As if we did not have enough trouble, and tomorrow her sister the cripple arriving; I am sure cripples are bad luck at weddings. Do you suppose there is some way we can ask Mary not to come?’

‘Noooooo!’ Asobel came running in from the porch. ‘I love Mary. She taught me to read. I love her like I love Harriet. Please don’t ask her not to come, Mamma, how can you be so horrible about her and Harriet and so cruel,’ and she burst into tears and threw herself on her mother’s lap.

‘I have never heard that cripples are bad luck,’ said Alice and burst into tears also.

Lucretia Cooper with a supreme effort of will pulled herself upright from the sofa and surveyed her weeping daughters. She gave a loud, large sigh. ‘Girls, girls. We are all far too excited and overwrought. We shall order some wine, even though we are expecting no visitors,’ and she rang the little bell on the table beside her. ‘And some Madeira cake. It is my own fault and only because I am so exhausted. Of course we all love Mary and she is not really a cripple, she has a small limp only. And I do believe that Harriet is only quiet because she is shy. She has been extremely kind.’ Asobel sat up, mollified, and her mother continued: ‘Augusta dear, you must not cry, you want to look your best at the wedding and remember, Lady Kingdom may come and you have only two more days to prepare yourself to look beautiful. As you will, in your elegant new dress. Alice, it is not like you to be so unkind to Augusta, who has been immensely kind and generous and helpful to you in your good fortune and I am sure you regret such unkindness with all your heart.’ And then she gave a little scream. ‘Oh good heavens, Donald, you startled me, I didn’t hear you come in. Where is our wine?’ But the butler handed her first a letter from his tray. She opened it immediately, and gasped.

‘Oh my dears, such good news. We must inform dear Harriet the minute she returns, she will be so pleased. A message to say Sir Charles will be accompanying dear Mary.’ And Lucretia Cooper’s demeanour suddenly improved visibly. ‘My dears. It will do a great deal for our side to have the Right Honourable Sir Charles Cooper as one of the family, they must not think all is on their side.’ She positively preened. ‘Now where is Donald with the wine?’

*   *   *

Harriet passed the stables. Edward was trying to calm a dog whose leg had obviously been broken; the leg hung, useless, as the dog tried to crawl away. Edward made calming, crooning noises; one of the grooms arrived with some saplings, laid them down on the ground and then knelt beside the dog also, and held its head.

‘Oh Edward! What has happened?’

‘She got kicked by John’s horse. I’m going to try and mend the leg, I can make a splint from one of these saplings. Keep out of the way Harriet, the dog will try to bite.’ She moved away but saw Edward lift the dog gently, talking to it all the time; then he suddenly grabbed the leg and tried to straighten it; the dog screamed in pain, reared for the groom’s face, its teeth bared. She heard Edward’s calming voice, and the dog’s cries, fainter, as she walked on into the shimmering afternoon.

She took the short cut to the town through her uncle’s fields; in the distance her uncle and her cousin John walked with a horse in the sunshine. In each field the wheat stacks stood tidily together, except for one field that was still to be harvested. She skirted the golden, waving stalks so as not to damage them; her skirt caught in the brambles and the bushes of the hedges at the side of the fields.

In a little more than an hour she saw the high steeple of the church. The small town was bustling: it was market day. Voices shouted their wares: turkeys, rabbits, ducks’ eggs, kaleidoscopes, lace, tin soldiers. A friend of her uncle’s recognised her, bowed, raised his hat. Harriet smiled demurely, bowed also, did not stop. John Bowker was standing, as he had said, under the clock. It struck a quarter to three as she walked towards him. The moment he saw her he smiled in relief and removed his cap. She felt rather shy, decided she would return at once, lifted the cover of the basket and took out the letters and the brochures as she approached him.

‘Good afternoon, miss.’

‘Good afternoon, John Bowker. I have written the letters for you.’ And she handed the bundle of papers to him.

In his enthusiasm to take the letters he took her gloved hand with them, felt her pull away, startled. He apologised at once, blushing slightly as he realised what he had done.

‘I hope – I hope the letters will change your life as you wish,’ and Harriet began to turn back the way she had come.

‘Miss – Miss –
Harriet
– I heard Mr John use your name – Miss Harriet, have you got just a bit of a minute more to spare?’

Harriet looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘My friend – he has a room just near here, he wants to travel too and he cannot write, please, Miss Harriet, it would take such a short time.’

She felt embarrassed, as if he should not have asked for more: he sensed this and blushed again.

‘Miss Harriet, this is life and death for the likes of us, and a few minutes for you, else I wouldn’t have bothered you.’ He looked quite desperate. She half-looked about her.

‘All right,’ she said at last, but reluctantly. ‘But only a moment.’

As if he understood at once that she might not like to walk with him, he moved slightly ahead of her, looking back now and then to see if she was following, holding his letters and his brochures carefully in front of him. Hens ran across her path and a huge cauliflower rolled out of a doorway. She avoided both of these impediments and the rabbit carcasses hanging from a nail and the blood that dripped from them and followed John Bowker round a corner and away from the main street down a narrow alley. Suddenly the streets were mean and dark, harder for the sun to penetrate. Doorways here looked darker and dirtier at once; the people who lounged in them made her feel uneasy and she wished she could go back. Backtracking down another narrow alley John Bowker slowed down and waited for her. Ahead of them stood several old hovels in need of much repair and what looked like a crumbling barn.

‘It’s just here, Miss Harriet.’ And he whistled. A shock of red hair appeared at a small hole in the wall of the barn, disappeared again immediately. Then, the red-haired person appeared from one of the dark doorways, grinning.

‘This is Miss Harriet,’ said John. ‘This is Seamus.’

Harriet nodded politely. But Seamus put out his hand and smiled and smiled and looked as if he might cry. Harriet extended her gloved hand.

‘You came then, miss,’ said Seamus. ‘And we’re the lucky ones, in the name of God we’re that. Come in. Come in.’

He was Irish.
She had been warned so often about the Irish rogues that had come to England after the failure of the crops in their own country; sometimes in a carriage she passed groups of men near where the new railways were being built, angry-looking and sullen and dangerous. Her heart beating very uncomfortably, Harriet was escorted through a doorway into the dark barn. She saw that there were puddles round the entrance but someone had put an old piece of wood down for her to walk across to where it was drier, further inside. There seemed to be shadowy people everywhere; she held her skirts up, kept passing people who leaned out of her way; she let out a muffled scream and almost lost her balance as something large ran past.

‘It’s only Porky,’ said Seamus soothingly. ‘Come in now, won’t you, come in.’

There was a box in the corner of the dark space, and a stool. On the box were four cups and a teapot. ‘Sit on the little stool now, will you, I’ll just get the hot water,’ said Seamus and he ran out of the barn again. Harriet sat gingerly and looked around, clearing her throat nervously. The only light came from the doorways, from the small hole whence Seamus’s red hair had materialised, and chinks of daylight could be seen through cracks in the old walls, but in the gloom it was clear that there were many other people in the barn. Some sat on the ground, some leaned against the walls and suddenly there was a scurrying, scraping sound, as if
rats
busied themselves in dark corners. Harriet drew her petticoats around her in horror. Pieces of wood hung from the roof at odd angles and the walls appeared to be caving in slightly and there was a strong, unpleasant smell: from the walls, from the mud on the floor, from the people. There was a pile of filthy, mud-covered blankets in one corner. She had the strong feeling that the whole barn could fall down on top of her at any moment; it made her feel slightly dizzy. John Bowker stood by the doorway, still holding his letters so carefully, and nobody in the barn spoke but she could hear all sorts of different breathing sounds, and people sniffed and coughed without talking. She was terrified.

‘Is Seamus a – a workman – like you?’ she asked John Bowker in a high, nervous voice and the sound seemed to echo among the coughing and the breathing and the movement and the silence.

‘No, no. He does all sorts of things. He’s a navvy. He makes honey.’

He must have been able to see the surprise on Harriet’s face. ‘Not here of course. He came here because of his sister. He works as a navvy in London most of the summer, builds the railway lines. They came across from Ireland because of the famine. But what he really wants to do, see, he’s got these fine bees in a hive and he reckons he could take them wherever we went and that honey would be in great demand.’

‘Would there not – would there not be bees
there,
wherever you went?’

‘He wants to take his hive. With the queen and that. To be sure of the finest honey. That’s right, Rosie, isn’t it?’

From the pile of blankets a tiny voice answered. ‘Fine honey would be the thing, miss. That’s what we was thinking. I’ll be helpin’ him, sure.’