Long Summer Day (43 page)

It opened before he got there and he saw Sydney was standing just outside in his long, white nightshirt, with a candlestick raised above his head. Martin rushed upon the boy with relief meaning him no harm at all but Sydney, uttering a single shriek, flung down his candle and fled. A moment later there was a loud crash of glass and Martin forgot about Sydney in his efforts to find the second candle and light it from matches he kept in his waistcoat pocket. He had some difficulty in lighting it for the matches were damp and his hands trembled violently. He managed it at last, however, and turned across the doorway to survey his work. There was blood enough in all conscience but it was not curling over in a wave, as he had imagined it would, whereas the untidy bundle that had been Arabella, although it looked rather like a large piece of flotsam, was not floating as surely it should have been. His sense of failure began to drag at him, like a cart being drawn up a steep hill and presently he understood the truth. Now, having made such a muddle of things, the devil would get him after all so he had best use what time there was to make away with himself in his own fashion. He clumped down to the kitchen, across the small yard to the barn and then up the ladder to the loft where he knew that baling cord was kept in a barrel. He found a length and in less than five minutes was out of reach of the devil in any guise. He hanged himself expertly, without even bothering to relight the storm lantern and see where to anchor the rope.

II

P
aul came slowly downstairs and found Ikey had already made the cocoa for the kettle had been on the boil and the cocoa was on the long table, together with sugar and a can of milk. For a few seconds, pausing outside the bedroom door, Paul had been sure that he was going to faint, but the sight of the boy pottering about in the kitchen was like looking through a window on a sane, workaday world, where folk went about everyday tasks and children of thirteen were sometimes capable of tremendous exertions and matchless courage. He said, hoarsely, ‘We’ll go for the foreman, Ikey. Don’t bother with the drinks!’ and he grabbed the boy and almost pushed him out of the house and into the blessed open air, stumbling over the slippery cobbles and down the muddy lane that led to the foreman’s cottage a hundred yards away. All the time he held Ikey’s hand tightly but for his own comfort more than Ikey’s and together they staggered through the slush until the lantern, which he had picked up instinctively in his flight, revealed the outline of the squat, thatched dwelling under the bank. Paul hammered on the door, shouting into the wind and when no one answered he fell to kicking the door with all his strength until a voice above called, ‘What’s to do? Who is it?’ and Paul shouted, ‘It’s Craddock, the Squire! Open up! There’s been bad trouble at the farm!’ and a moment later the door was unlocked to reveal Eveleigh, the foreman, his flannel nightgown stuffed into his corduroys and a bemused expression on his narrow, intelligent face. They went into the kitchen and Mrs Eveleigh called down from the top of the stairs, ‘What is it, Norman?’ and Eveleigh told her to come down and blow up the fire and make sure that the children stayed in bed.

Inside the little kitchen Paul’s senses again began to swim and it required a stiff tot of Eveleigh’s rum to steady him. Mrs Eveleigh, a pleasant-voiced, ginger-haired woman, bustled about getting hot drinks and it was not until she put a mug in his hand that Paul said, ‘Martin Codsall is dead, Eveleigh! He’s just made away with himself!’ but he made no mention of the bundle upstairs, waiting until Ikey’s eyes were lowered over his cocoa before jerking his head to indicate that they should get the boy out of the room. Eveleigh seemed an exceptionally quick-witted man. He said, briefly, ‘Pop the boy in with young Gil, Marian. He’s chilled through and we can send him back in the morning, when he’s got a good breakfast inside him!’ and Ikey went off without another word. Eveleigh said, sombrely, ‘Did the lad see it?’

‘He saw Martin hanging from a beam in the barn,’ Paul told him, ‘but thank God he saw nothing worse!’

‘Arabella? And their boy, Sydney?’

‘Only Arabella. Ikey was there earlier and got Sydney away. Arabella is lying in the bedroom.’

Eveleigh looked thoughtful and Paul, who had always respected the man, could not help admiring his remarkable self-control and complete lack of blather. The foreman said, finally, ‘Well, I can’t say I’m surprised but I never thought it would run to murder. How did he go about it?’

‘With a hay knife,’ Paul said, ‘it’s still up there and nothing will induce me to go back, Eveleigh. In any case, everything had better be left as it is until the police get here. It’s a miracle the boy escaped,’ and he told briefly of Codsall’s attempt on Ikey’s life with the gun and how Sydney had jumped from the window.

‘It might easily have been my missus and my kids,’ Eveleigh said, soberly. ‘Doctor O’Keefe should have put the old fool away months ago!’ Then, glancing at Paul under his dark brows, ‘Do you think you could help me to take The Gaffer down, sir?’

‘Yes,’ Paul said, ‘I think I could manage that after another glass of rum!’ and Eveleigh poured him a measure and went into the scullery to get his rubber boots and mackintosh. He called upstairs, ‘I’m going up there now, Marian! Better dress and start breakfast,’ and Paul marvelled at his matter-of-fact tone and phlegm. ‘How many children have you?’ he asked and Eveleigh told him six, four girls and two boys, the eldest of them eleven. ‘Gaffer was a hard man to work for,’ he said, as they trudged up the lane, ‘but his son Will would have made things all right. She was the main trouble, of course; she never could get to grips with a farm. A man oughtn’t to go looking for a wife outside the place where he was born and raised!’

It was only then that Paul remembered Grace and the child she was struggling to bring into the world. It seemed to him incredible that he could have completely forgotten her during the last two hours but it was so. All his nervous energy had been expended getting here through the storm and after that the sight of Codsall, and the shambles in the bedroom, had wiped everything from his mind. He said, ‘Mrs Craddock is having her first child tonight, Eveleigh. There were serious complications and I had to leave before it was born,’ and he thought the man glanced at him sympathetically although he could not be sure. The storm was subsiding rapidly now and the comparative silence, after the uproar, was uncanny, as though everything in the Valley had been smashed down and beaten flat like Arabella. Eveleigh flung the barn door wide and there was just light enough to see the two horses, munching hay beyond the partition and, over to the left alongside the loft ladder, the thick-set figure of Martin Codsall gyrating in the draught.

‘God’s mercy!’ Eveleigh said, softly, ‘how did he manage it? Did he leave a lantern burning?’

‘No,’ Paul told him, ‘it was pitch dark when we came in. He must have gone about the whole business in the dark!’ and he thought, ‘That’s curious! Eveleigh’s first thought was the danger of fire! He’s a good farmer and deserves something better than this,’ and he found himself drawing strength from the man’s stillness as he respectfully directed Paul to climb the ladder and cut the cord, while he enfolded Martin’s body in his strong, wiry arms and gently lowered it to the floor. Codsall did not look much like a man who had hanged himself. His eyes were closed and his mouth tight shut. He looked almost as calm as someone who had died in his sleep. ‘He must have done it soon after the boy left here,’ Eveleigh said, ‘for he’s stone cold, poor old devil!’ Paul noticed that the soles of Codsall’s boots were caked with blood and turned away, so that Eveleigh said gently, ‘You go on home, sir, and see to your wife. I can manage here, me an’ the missus will take care of your stable-lad. He must be a spunky kid to ha’ done all he did.’

Paul, ashamed of his weakness, said, ‘What about informing the police?’ and Eveleigh told him that Ben and Gerry would be here in an hour and he would send one of them to Whinmouth and meantime keep everyone out of the house. ‘You might send one of Honeyman’s men over, sir,’ he suggested, ‘we shall need help one way and another,’ and Paul recalled then that Honeyman would have been informed by now and would probably arrive before the labourers. ‘Now you’d best get off, sir!’ Eveleigh said, impatiently, as though he would prefer to handle things alone. ‘I’m mortal sorry about it, Mr Craddock, and somehow I feel it’s partly my fault not keeping an eye on him. Still, a man has so much to do, things being what they have been about here lately.’

Paul thanked him and led Snowdrop out of the barn, leaving the cob for Ikey. It was almost light now and the temperature was surprisingly mild for January. He rode out of the farm gate half resolving never to enter it again but as he forded the river, and rode along the road under the wood he thought more anxiously of Grace than of Four Winds. Half-way up the drive he overtook the forlorn figure of Horace Handcock, the gardener, swathed in an immense overcoat and splashed to the waist with red mud of the paddock. Paul reined in at once and asked him if Honeyman had been alerted.

Handcock’s red face emerged reluctantly from the folds of his coat but he brightened when he recognised the horseman.

‘Aye, I’ve done that! He’s on his way now, along with Matt but there’s good news for ’ee, zir! It’s a boy, and Doctor O’Keefe told Mrs Handcock they’re both doing well! May I be the first to wish ’ee good luck, zir?’

‘Yes, you may indeed,’ Paul said, thankfully, ‘and I’m sorry we had to get you out in the middle of the night! Mrs Craddock is bearing up?’

‘The missus has been in to her and ’er’s taken broth,’ Handcock told him, gleefully. ‘It all happened minutes bevore I zet out. Seven pounds odd he be, zo they zay an’ bawling like a young calf when I left, zir!’

A great wave of gratitude engulfed Paul and he began to feel lightheaded, as though all the whisky he had swallowed earlier in the evening and the rum poured him by Eveleigh, were mounting to his brain. He thought, ‘There’s good and bad here and it’s all mixed up! Martin Codsall runs amok with a hay knife, children leap from windows in their nightshirts, a man hangs himself in a barn, but then, as counterweights, I’ve come up against Ikey’s guts, Eveleigh’s steadiness and this little character’s goodwill!’ And suddenly he felt braced and optimistic, riding into the yard where everyone was astir, and there was an air of bustle about the house. Mrs Handcock beamed at him from the top of the kitchen steps and Chivers, the groom, took Snowdrop’s bridle with an air of deference, as though the arrival of an heir improved the status of the father. He found O’Keefe supping tea in the kitchen and was at once reminded of Four Winds but he did not have the heart to wipe the smile from the housekeeper’s face by telling what had occurred. Instead he said, ‘May I go up and see her now?’ and the doctor said he could and that the specialist had agreed to accompany him to Four Winds as soon as he had washed and packed his bag. ‘Well, there’s little enough you can do over there, except certify!’ Paul told him as soon as Mrs Handcock was out of earshot and the doctor shrugged and lit his pipe. As a practitioner of nearly fifty years’ experience he was proof against the shock of violent death.

Paul went up the stairs hesitantly, a little shy at the prospect of seeing her. Thirza, the parlourmaid, wearing the mantle of nurse as though she had been created a baroness, slipped out of the room as he entered and said smugly, ‘’E’s a praaper li’l tacker, Mr Craddock, but ’er’s had a tumble bad time, I can tell ’ee!’

He saw that Grace, although propped up, was asleep and stole across the big room to the window where the cot stood in the angle of the wall made by the bay. The baby’s eyes were open and he looked back at Paul with a kind of shrewd interest. Newborn babies, Paul recalled, were usually brick-red, as bald as coots, and generally regarded as ugly by all but their mothers, but this child was neither red nor bald. His skin was as pale as his mother’s and his hair as dark as Grace’s but the tufts looked as though they had been stuck on his pate by a practical joker. Paul lowered his finger gently, letting it slide along the baby’s cheek and the child opened his mouth like a day-old thrush.

He was still standing there, back to the bed, when he heard a movement from the bed and turning saw that she was not asleep after all but looking directly at him. He tiptoed over, aware of the filth on his boots and the clamminess of his clothes, noting that she looked exhausted but very composed. Her skin glowed and her two large dimples played hide and seek in the lamplight. He said, quickly, ‘I can’t kiss you, Grace. I’m filthy. I never stopped to wash but came straight up thinking you were asleep!’ He tried to say something conventional, to ask how she felt or whether she was pleased the child was a boy, but the sharp memory of Arabella’s bedroom confused him and he dropped his gaze, waiting for her to speak. She said, calmly, ‘You had to go out somewhere?’ and he told her something happened during the storm at Four Winds but that it was attended to now.

‘It must have been important,’ she said but without irony and he answered that it had been important and that was why he had no choice but to go. ‘The baby is a lovely child,’ he said, trying to steer her away from Four Winds, ‘but it was terrible to have to go through all that, Grace! I was downstairs most of yesterday and felt absolutely useless.’

She smiled faintly, ‘Well, I imagine you were, Paul, but that’s a husband’s prerogative. You’re pleased it’s a boy, I suppose?’

‘I didn’t care what it was,’ he said truthfully. ‘All day yesterday I don’t think I gave the baby a thought as anything except a source of your pain and my fear. I’m glad now, though, and happier still that it’s behind you. You’d best sleep, dear. I’ll get a bath and change and if you’re awake I’ll come up after luncheon.’ He wished that he could bend over her and kiss her but he checked the impulse, moving towards the door. He had his hand on the knob when she called, ‘Paul!’ and he turned, looking at her anxiously.

‘What is it, dear?’

‘What did happen at Four Winds?’

‘I’ll tell you about it later.’

‘But I want to know, Paul. I want to know why you’re in such a mess, and why you’re so upset. I don’t like people treating me as if I was a sick child and you should know that by now!’