Cherry Tree Lane (2 page)

What he was short of was … oh, he didn’t know. Companionship was the nearest he could come to it, someone to work alongside him and raise his children, someone to talk to in the evenings. And a wife to look after his house. Even with the help of a woman from the village, he was making a poor fist of it, he knew.

But he wasn’t going to make another marriage of convenience. Alice had been a decent soul, a hard-working wife, especially in the early years, because she too loved being out of doors. It hadn’t been enough, though. She hadn’t been a good companion for a thinking man, because she’d not been interested in anything beyond her home and family. In fact, she’d bored him, though he felt guilty every time he admitted that to himself.

He hadn’t realised how much Alice had helped him around the place, though, until he had to manage without her. Images flashed through his mind as they did every time he thought of the accident. A horse had unseated its rider during a hunt a few fields away. He’d learnt later that the man had been whipping it and caught it in one eye. It had run away and leapt a hedge, crashing into their little cart and sending Alice flying like a rag doll.

They’d had to put the horse down, it’d been screaming in agony. His wife hadn’t screamed. She’d died before he could even pull himself out of the wreckage and across to her. He’d broken his leg, which had left him with a permanent limp. It wasn’t a bad limp, but it did slow him down a bit and ached sometimes if he overdid things.

As he stood up to ease his back, he saw Miss Newington leaving the big house. She came to the gates, stood staring down the hill and when she saw him, waved and set off towards him.

He hurried across to the bucket to wash the worst of the dirt off his hands and dried them on his trousers for lack of a towel. Miss Newington was quite elderly, so couldn’t walk fast, but she liked to get out and about and he always enjoyed a chat with her. He suspected that she was even lonelier than he was.

She waited for him to open the gate for her, then said in her abrupt way, ‘I want to talk to you, Kemble.’

‘Would you like to come inside and sit down, miss?’

‘No. I’d rather sit on that bench of yours. They say there’s rain on the way, so we don’t want to waste this beautiful sunshine, do we?’

He waited till she’d sat down, then obeyed a wave of her hand and joined her on the bench.

‘Now that Hillman’s dead, I’m going to need someone to collect my rents from the village and oversee the small repairs. Are you interested in the job?’

He didn’t hesitate. ‘I certainly am.’

‘Think you can handle it? They do try to get out of paying. And then there are the accounts to keep.’

‘I’m good at figures, take after my mother there, and I’ll know who can pay and who can’t.’

‘The job’s yours, then. Five per cent, you’ll keep, like Hillman did. Come up to the house this evening and I’ll pass on the paperwork.’ She stared across his main field. ‘Your crops look to be doing well.’

‘They are, but they’ll be better still for a drop of rain.’ He looked up at the sky. No clouds yet, but he could sense the rain coming.

‘My rheumatism tells me they’ll get more than a drop.’ She eased herself to her feet.

He didn’t try to help her, because she was fiercely independent. She’d had to be to take over a run-down house at her age. No one had expected her to inherit. The estate had been sold off piece by piece by the last owner, who hadn’t cared about it after his only child, the son and heir, had been killed in the Boer War.

Every house in the village had tied a black bow to their front door when that happened and kept their curtains drawn as a sign of respect. The landowner hadn’t been seen for months after the funeral, then he’d emerged from his drinking bouts a changed man, bitter and uncaring about his tenants’ welfare.

He’d not left the house to his nephew, a sharp man who lived in the next village, but to his niece, who had moved away with the rest of his youngest brother’s family when she was in her teens. Her inheriting had surprised everyone. They’d been even more surprised when she didn’t sell the place to her cousin, because everyone knew Arthur Newington had expected to inherit and was eager to set himself up at the hall.

You never knew what life would bring you, Jacob mused.

He and Alice had had such plans for improving this land and making it into a thriving market garden, selling quality produce at higher prices to the best greengrocers’ shops in nearby towns. In that, at least, they’d been compatible. But he couldn’t seem to think straight since the accident, had just carried on as best he could with the one field under cultivation and the others rented out for the grazing.

He really should take one of the fields back and put it to better use. But it was all he could do at the moment to tend this one and look after his children. His eyes lifted to the cherry trees that bordered the lane. They were just coming into bloom, the mass of pale-pink blossom so beautiful he looked forward to seeing it every spring.

He really must pull himself together now that he’d got the rent-collecting job. The money would make a big difference, allow him to put something by for the future, and hire better help in the house.

Collecting village rents was only part of the work Hillman had done, because Miss Newington had a few properties in nearby Wootton Bassett. He wondered who was looking after them for her. A shrewd lady, Miss Newington, and well liked in the village, for all her outspoken ways.

It was willpower that got Mattie up and moving round the house on the Thursday morning, but she didn’t go to work. She kept telling herself it was the third day of this cold and everyone knew you were past the worst after three days, so tomorrow she’d be all right to leave – she had to be.

That evening her stepfather plonked the housekeeping money down on the table, as usual, hesitated, then added another shiny florin. ‘Here’s two bob extra. Better get yourself a lemon and some honey. You need to be well for Stan on Sunday. We’re not letting him down.’

‘Thanks.’ Mattie scooped up the money and put it in her purse.

The following morning Bart went off to work as usual when the hooter sounded at the Works. It was so loud they said you could hear it from ten miles away, and it sounded not only to start the day, but to end it, too. Most able-bodied men in Swindon and the nearby villages hurried off to the Railway Works on its command; most housewives planned their days around it.

Nell and Renie got ready for their jobs in the local laundry, both looking slightly plumper than usual because they were wearing as many clothes as they could.

Nell came running back to give Mattie a final hug. ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’

‘Of course I will.’ But Mattie’s voice rasped and she could feel the phlegm rattling in her chest as she fought the urge to cough. ‘We’ve got no choice, you know that.’

‘I’m going to miss you.’

Mattie saw tears welling in both her sisters’ eyes. ‘None of that! Do you want to make people guess something’s up?’ she demanded sharply. ‘We’ll see one another again.’

‘We won’t even know where you are, or you us,’ Nell said, sniffing and wiping away a tear. ‘And you’re still not well. I don’t know how you’re going to manage.’

‘Cliff can write to his family in a year or two. I’ll find out where you are from them.’ She reached out to hold on to the table.

‘You’re still dizzy,’ Renie protested. ‘How can you possibly manage on your own?’

‘I’ll manage because I have to. I want to get away as much as you do. More. This is my only chance to escape marrying Stan.’ She not only feared her stepfather’s violence, but the way he might use her sisters again to persuade her to do what he wanted.

She packed as much as she could in a bundle and dressed in some old clothes she’d been keeping to tear up for cleaning rags, covering her head with a shawl they used to run out to the backyard privy. Today she wanted to look old and poor. But her red hair showed clearly still, so she got out the flour and rubbed it into the front. That was better.

Pulling the shawl low over her forehead, she practised hobbling along with a stoop and thought she was doing quite well. But she didn’t try to leave the town. Not yet. She knew she was taking a big risk, but she couldn’t, she just couldn’t leave till she’d made sure her sisters had got away safely.

As the fingers on the big station clock twitched their way towards nine o’clock, she stood across from the station, leaning against the wall in a little alley. She watched as Nell and Renie arrived, hurrying into the station by the side entrance. Nell had been going to pretend they had a dying relative and needed to visit her.

Where was Cliff, though?

The station clock ticked the minutes off and Mattie waited, getting more and more anxious. What were the others going to do if Cliff changed his mind at the last minute? They hadn’t even got the money for fares, because their father took everything they earned.

With only three minutes to go till the train left, Cliff came running down the street, carrying an old suitcase. She closed her eyes for a minute in shuddering relief and when she opened them, she saw him at the ticket window, pushing some money across. He ran towards the platform and out of her sight.

She waited in the alley till the train left in a cloud of steam and even then she had to go across and check that her sisters weren’t still standing on the platform.

To her horror she met a neighbour coming out of the station, but the woman didn’t seem to recognise her and simply walked past. Had she seen Renie and Nell?

Feeling faint with relief that they’d got away safely, Mattie turned and went across to the tram stop. She spent some of her precious coins to go to the end of the line, heading south-eastwards. Then she began walking towards Wootton Bassett, thinking of making her way to Bath eventually. She couldn’t afford to spend any more on fares, not if she wanted to eat. She wasn’t sure how she would earn a living, but surely something would turn up? She was a hard worker, and wouldn’t mind what she did.

If only it would stop raining! She was soaked already and it was hard moving against the driving rain coming in from the west. She felt to be burning up with fever one minute and shivering with cold the next. Every now and then she was forced to stop and rest, because she felt so weak, but fear of what would happen if Bart caught her made her summon up the strength to trudge on.

As she was taking a rest on a stone by the side of the road, a man in a trap stopped to ask, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Just a bit tired, thank you, sir.’

‘Are you going far?’

‘Bath,’ she said. ‘To my brother’s. But I’ve not got the money to go by train.’

‘That’s a long way to walk.’

She nodded.

‘I can give you a ride for a few miles, if you want.’

Unable to believe her luck, for a minute she couldn’t speak, then she gasped. ‘Thank you. Oh, bless you for that, sir.’

‘Hop up.’

The struggle to haul herself up left her breathless.

He eyed her pityingly. ‘You’re not well. You shouldn’t be out in weather like this.’

‘I don’t have any choice. I’m really grateful for your help.’

It seemed only a few minutes before he set her down again, but she felt it was an omen, because it had moved her on more than she could possibly have managed on foot, even if she wasn’t ill, which would surely put them off the scent if they came after her.

She was going to get away, just like her sisters, she told herself, her spirits lifting. She was going to do it. Why, even the rain had stopped. She looked up at the sky and her heart sank. More dark clouds were massing in the west. It’d not be fine for long.

She lost all sense of time, but later it started to pelt down and she stood under a tree for a while, shivering as she sheltered. But the rain had clearly set in and she couldn’t stand here all day. She was still much too close to Swindon, so had to keep moving.

She was soaked to the skin and her shoes squelched as she walked, which made her smile grimly. If she died of pneumonia, she’d definitely get away from him.

After a while she found herself talking aloud and stopped in dismay, trying to pull herself together. But soon she found herself muttering again. ‘Just a few more steps, just a few more steps.’ It helped to walk to the rhythm of those words, so she gave up trying to keep quiet. There was no one to hear her because no one else was mad enough to be out in such a storm.

Time passed in a blur and she found herself sitting on a bench under a tree without the faintest idea of how long she’d been there, then resting in the lee of a wall overhung by a tall bush. Her clothes were dripping water, her bundle too.

She wasn’t sure where she was when night started to fall. She seemed to have left the main road and taken a side road, but that was probably a good thing, because
he
wouldn’t know where she’d turned off the main road, even if he traced her this far.

‘Find a barn,’ she muttered. ‘Got to … find a barn. Got to … stop for the night.’ Darkness had fallen now and she was shivering continuously, her hands and feet feeling like blocks of ice. She had some bread and cheese in her bundle. It’d be soggy, but you could still eat it if you were hungry, only she wasn’t. She had the housekeeping money to buy more food with and water was free in any stream. She was managing. Just. But oh, she felt so weary and so cold.

Surely there should be houses nearby? She looked ahead for lights but saw none. She’d slowed right down now, could only stagger a few steps, stop, stagger on again.

Then, just as she was thinking she couldn’t force herself to take one more step, she saw it – a light shining in the distance, slightly to the right, and a lane that turned in that direction. A few steps more and she could see what looked like the lights of a village down a lane to the left, but they were further away than the first light, so she headed for that.

A few steps, then stop. A few more steps. She stumbled and fell, lay for a minute or two with rain beating down on her in the darkness. Dragging herself up on her knees, she summoned up the strength to get to her feet and staggered on.