Long Summer Day (28 page)

She stopped wheezing then and glared at him through a matted screen of hair, for clearly he was not mad after all. Incredibly he had done this terrible thing deliberately, a crafty, premeditated manoeuvre, aimed at cheating her of her revenge. She said, softly and murderously, ‘I’ll make you pay for this, Martin Codsall! As God is me judge, I’ll make you pay!’ but her threat did not disturb him unduly for he reflected, whilst turning the trap and heading back to the river road, that he had already paid all he had or was likely to have and what profit was there in plaguing a bankrupt?

Barely a mile from the spot on the edge of the moor, where Martin Codsall had turned the trap earlier in the day, his son and daughter-in-law were using the fading light to make the Priory farmhouse habitable. It was not really a farmhouse at all but a largish cottage, still half a ruin. Will and Elinor, helped by the biblical twins, Matt and Luke, had retimbered and rethatched the roof, and had also given the whole place a thorough scouring but their main efforts had been directed to the outhouses, for, as Will had put in on the day he had first taken Elinor there, ‘Us can only live in one room at a time and us must have somewhere for the livestock when the weather zets in.’ Now, on their owners’ wedding night, a fat sow and her litter were snug in the small sty and two dozen saddlebacks were snoring in the big sty, while Gertie, the Alderney, old Willoughby’s wedding gift, occupied a byre that was rather more comfortable than the farm kitchen where some of the broken windows were plugged with cardboard. Bride and groom made light of discomfort, however, for it seemed to them a very wonderful thing to be alone in a house of their own and as soon as they had changed they borrowed Willoughby’s trap and drove over the moor in the teeth of the storm, stabling the horse in the ramshackle stable and lighting a roaring fire from sawn timber left over from the repairs. By the time it was dark and the lamp was lit, the kitchen began to look like a home although there was nothing on the stone floor but a rush mat and only a single wooden chair beside the open hearth, where Elinor had set a rickety table and the milking stool left by the Hardcastles. Fortunately Hardcastle’s widow had also bequeathed them other pieces that had not been considered worth the trouble of hauling away after the funeral. Upstairs, in the now rainproof main bedroom, was a rusty iron bedstead, already neatly made with Elinor’s hoarded linen, a chest of drawers warped by damp and a cracked sheet of backed glass for use as a mirror. In the scullery was a built-in dresser, with a few chipped cups and plates which would do for the time being for all their savings, including the Squire’s sovereign wedding gift, had been laid out on pigs and winter feed.

About six o’clock Elinor called Will from the stairs, where he was replacing rotted boards and she might have been married years rather than hours judged by the casual way she summoned him to his meal and sat him on the only chair whilst she took the stool and began to ladle generous helpings of thick vegetable stew into which he dipped bread she had baked that same morning. They ate in silence and while they were occupied in everyday habits—eating, firemending, washing up under the scullery pump—they were neither shy nor withdrawn. It was only later, when Elinor carried the stone hot-water bottle upstairs to air the lavender-scented linen she had brought as her portion, that the fearful wonder of the situation touched her and she took the opportunity, whilst he was finishing his carpentry, of slipping out of her clothes and pausing for a moment in front of the cracked mirror to study herself in the light of the candle. She was not sure that she liked what she saw, a small, girlish body, with honey-coloured plaits almost as thick as her wrists screening her small, hard breasts. ‘Well,’ she mused, ‘I wonder if he’ll like me now he’s got me?’ and then, doubtfully but not altogether apprehensively, ‘and I wonder if he’ll use me roughly, as he tried to often enough in the old days?’ She already thought of their courtship as ‘the old days’, belonging to the distant past but she no longer feared Mrs Codsall’s sourness or persecution. She was done with Four Winds and so, praise God, was Will! The few words, spoken by the red-haired preacher from Whinmouth, had banished Mrs Codsall and all her works so that nobody, not even King Edward himself, could separate them now and the certainty of this warmed her belly and thighs, reaching to the tips of her little toes on the bare boards at the foot of the bed. She pushed the stone water bottle to ‘his side’ and stood holding her long flannel nightdress against herself, fearful and expectant, yet somehow safe and rooted. Then she put the candle down on the box beside the bed and unlatched the door, calling to him as he knelt, hammering in the light of a storm-lamp hooked to the banister.

‘Will,’ she said, ‘I’m going to bade now, unless you’ll be wanting anything more.’

‘No, midear,’ he called back, ‘I’ll damp the vire and come on up. Tiz a botchy ole job in this kind o’ light!’

The mildness of his voice reassured her, banishing the last of her fears and she went back into the bedroom, folded her nightgown and placed it under his pillow, for he had told her some time ago that he liked to ‘sleep high’ and the only pillows they had were two ratty old cushions, loaned by Aunt Mary. Then she got into bed and inhaled the lavender scent, reaching out and touching the space where he would lie and finding it well-warmed by the bottle. He came in holding the storm lantern high and looked down on her with a great, broad smile, the first she had seen on his face that day.

‘Ah, youm lovely, Elinor,’ he said, ‘and I dorn know what I done to deserve ’ee!’

‘Youm a lovely gurt thing yourself, Will,’ she told him, ‘and never let no one tell you different! Make haste man and blow thicky candle out!’

IV

W
inter entered the valley like a white nun, austerely beautiful but pitiless, glorifying in mortification of the flesh and calling upon men to face realities.

Young Henry Pitts, of Hermitage, saw winter not as a nun, however, but as a malevolent clown who got under his feet and threw him headlong on the steep path to the sties, who clothed his Guernseys in their breath and sent them mincing over iced ruts to frozen pools, who sealed the very gate latches with ice and threatened his winter corn, sown with so much effort in early autumn. For the snow reached Hermitage first, moving in from the north-east and the heavy flakes floated rather than fell, each being set down gently and individually by a wind that had carried them all the way from the Russian steppes. Then, having frozen the imperishable grin on Henry’s rubbery face, winter moved south-west, scattering diamonds across the Codsall stubble, slowing the Sorrel current, sealing its oxbow and stiffening its rushes, until it plucked at Martin Codsall’s long nose as he stood cursing the clumsiness of his new cowman and declaring that Will had emptied udders in half the time taken by his replacement. Then the frost doubled to strike the Home Farm, silencing the sawmill and reminding the shepherd twins, Matt and Luke, that the lambing season was not far off and if snow fell now it might go hard with them in February. Down at the foot of the Coombe the snow lay lightly but the wind was just as keen and Meg and her thinly clad daughters shivered in their leaking kitchen and wash-house. Only Tamer, with over sixteen stone of blubber to protect him, could sneer at the sky and waddle across his turnip fields wondering who would do his spring sowing now that Squire had deprived him of Sam.

Higher up the Dell, where soon nobody could distinguish between Potter’s broken fences and the tiny hedgerows of Farmer Willoughby, drifts began to pile where the timber was sparse and Willoughby’s hired man, plodding about Elinor’s business in the henhouses, wondered glumly why the birds resented Elinor’s abdication so much that they had gone into a mass moult. Mary still kept her school, for the Valley children were a hardy lot and as long as the river road was open continued to ride or walk to their morning lessons. There was a warm stove in the schoolroom and a long row of hooks over it to dry mittens and gaiters, and always, sharp at ten-thirty, cocoa for every scholar, even those banished to corners and wearing dunces’ caps.

On the bleak upland of Derwent’s holding tempers were sharper than the frost, for Edward Derwent sorely missed Claire and Rose was worried about her horses, realising there could be no hunting this side of New Year. Even at exercise the snow balled under shoes and brought animals down, so that they spent most of their time in loose boxes, eating the season’s profits.

Perhaps the only two souls in the entire Valley to welcome the snow were Ikey Palfrey and Hazel Potter, the one because here in the country it was a novel experience, the other because it gave her an excuse to play truant every day.

Ikey had seen snow before, of course, but never snow like this, pure, unsullied and dazzling white, crisp, powdery and untrodden by man or beast. When snow fell on Bermondsey it never lay more than an hour but was soon slush under the pressure of boots, hooves and cartwheels. Under a mantle of snow every Thames-side factory looked like a prison and every dwelling was seen as the squat, defeated hovel it really was but down here, especially when the sun shone, the long slope between the big house and Shallowford Woods turned coral and rose-pink and every branch of every tree became a crystal chandelier. The birds grew tame, not merely sparrows and thrushes that always haunted the scrapyard, but all kinds of birds, some of which he had never seen at close quarters, great tits and blue tits, crested wrens, greenfinches, bullfinches and dozens of perky robins who perched on the harness pegs and ate crumbs from his hand. Then there were gloriously long slides in the drive and snowball fights with Gappy, the gardener’s boy, when Chivers was safely out of the way, but Ikey liked best his lonely tramps along the edge of the woods and up the west face of the Coombe to school, for here, in a silent, winter world, he could indulge his extravagant fancies and there was no one in sight to break the spell.

He saw himself in many disguises and by no means always against a background of snow and ice but sometimes crossing waterless deserts and mountain ranges and sometimes rafting across the Pacific or shifting for himself (and possibly Squire Craddock) on a coral island, like Jack, Ralph and Peterkin, in Ballantyne’s book. During those tramps to and from Deepdene he was everyone he had ever met in Mary Willoughby’s library—Robinson Crusoe, Monte Cristo, D’Artagnan, Sherlock Holmes, Jim Hawkins and David Balfour on the run from redcoats. Anyone watching him making his way across the meadow to Hazel Potter’s squirrel tree, or along the southern edge of Shallowford Woods, might have thought him pursued by Furies. Every now and then he looked fearfully over his shoulder and darted for cover to emerge, bent double, to dash across the snow, firing as he ran until he reached a bank where, it seemed, yet another ambush awaited him which he evaded by changing direction and disappearing into a ditch.

He was so engaged one overcast morning on his way home from Deepdene after Mary Willoughby had dismissed school an hour before time because Derwent had told her there would be another fall by mid-afternoon. Ikey usually went part way home with Sydney Codsall and children of a Codsall labourer, but they were an unadventurous group and preferred to take the track down the Dell and through the Potter holding to the river road, whereas Ikey liked the steep slopes of the Bluff, where he could toboggan down to the thick gorse that grew along the edge of the Coombe and then, by a frozen brook and two stiles, enter the meadows bordering Shallowford Woods.

It was very cold but he moved swiftly and kept his blood circulating, so that when he reached the woods he felt pleasantly warm and was tempted by a faint gleam of sunshine to use his extra hour’s freedom by pushing through brittle briars to the top of the escarpment, overlooking the mere. He had not thought of the mere as being a solid oval of ice, with its mysterious, pagoda-crowned island as the sole break in its surface but now it occurred to him that he might be able to cross over and inspect the ruin, which was something he had been wanting to do for some time. He went on down to the margin and tested the ice but it was not strong enough to bear his weight so he moved round the lake to its far side to explore a part of the wood that was new to him. A tangle of evergreens grew here, close-set larch and dwarf pine, stockaded about with overgrown laurels and rhododendrons and it was here that he flushed a hare, who bounded from under his feet and dashed into the woods with Ikey in hot pursuit. He soon lost sight of the hare but found instead some deer tracks and followed them for about a mile along a narrow twisting path that split and split again, until he lost the tracks at a spot where a pine had fallen across the path barring further progress.

He had been so intent upon the chase that he had not noticed snow had begun to fall but when he turned back, seeking the mere, it drove into his face so harshly that he could hardly see his way and although he reasoned that it could not be more than two o’clock the wood seemed terrifyingly dark and gloomy. His outward tracks were now obliterated and soon he realised that he must have taken a wrong turning, for he blundered on and on in growing desperation without being able to break free of the tangled undergrowth or come within sight of the lake. Snow whirled down on him more and more thickly and in spite of his exertions he began to feel numb, particularly in the foot that got wet testing the ice. He tried to console himself with the thought that this was a real adventure but it was little comfort. His courage ebbed with every step and soon he realised he was wholly lost and likely to stay lost unless he could find help or shelter. He held on as long as he could, and perhaps a little longer, setting his teeth and slashing with numbed hands at the clawing briars and laurel branches but at last, as he entered a tiny clearing, the storm, the thicket and the paralysing cold defeated him and he uttered a wild shout of despair that issued from him involuntarily like a soul quitting a body.

The sound of his own voice encouraged him a little and he shouted again but when there was no answer he suddenly burst into tears and sat down on a log, thrusting his knuckles into his eyes and howling with terror and misery. He was still in this unheroic posture when he heard the crunch of feet and looking up, wildly hopeful, saw Hazel Potter standing gazing down at him in silent wonder, one hand pulling at her lip, the other swinging a small tin attached to her wrist by a string.