Saddle the Wind (2 page)

His lack of physical strength, though, only made her love him the more, she realized; those imperfections – his weak chest and lame right leg. And such a tiny, feeble creature he’d been at birth. She could remember so well when Ollie had first seen him. It had mattered not at all the encouragement in her voice as she’d said, ‘A son, Ollie. You’ve got another son to help you out.’ She had seen the expression of disappointment on his face.

And he had never shown affection for the child; merely toleration. And there were times, of course, when she was sure that Arthur was aware of it. How could he not be? And how could Ollie withhold his love like that? Not that he showed that much affection for the others – apart from Mary. How could it be, she wondered, that a man with so much feeling in some ways could be so lacking in it in others … ? Perhaps, though, she said to herself, there just wasn’t that much love in his heart; perhaps it just wasn’t there to give –
the way some people had no sense of smell; or like Arthur with his own lack – his inability to walk or breathe as he should …

And it was partly that, too, Sarah knew – Ollie’s lack of love for Arthur – that turned her own heart even more strongly towards the boy. So many of the tears she had wept had been for Arthur. Those nights when she had held him in her arms as he had lain gasping for breath, or on those bright afternoons when, looking from the steamed-up scullery window, she had seen him hurrying, dot-and-carry, in the wake of his adored, agile, elder brother.

She sighed again and, moving silently, stepped around the end of the boys’ bed to the window where she parted the curtains and gazed out.

On the very outskirts of the village of Hallowford, the thatched cottage was the last in a row of three pairs of cottages that flanked the northeast side of Coates Lane, the narrow way that met with Gorse Hill to the south and, to the north, joined up with Elm Road. It comprised a front parlour, kitchen and scullery downstairs, and two bedrooms upstairs. The rear bedroom window at which Sarah stood looked out over the yard with the shed and the privy, and, beyond them, the garden, a narrow little strip of land bearing two small apple trees and the vegetables that Ollie had planted. The view hardly differed at all from that of the neighbours, the Hewitts, on the left. Raising her eyes slightly Sarah saw beyond the garden the dark shape of the Ridge rising up, a high cliff, its sheer, chalk face gleaming faintly in the May night.

She sighed and let the curtain fall back into place. She was tired, and her back ached from all the pails of water she had had to carry from the pump that day, from all the stooping over the washtub. Turning, she
looked at the two girls asleep in the second bed, next to the wall. Mary, her elder daughter, was seven. Beside her slept Agnes. She, the youngest of all at not quite two, lay with her dark hair next to Mary’s blonde curls, her arm across her chest.

Sarah’s eyes shifted back to the peaceful face of Mary and lingered there. Mary … Yes, Ollie loved her all right, and had done so right from the moment she had been placed, red and lustily squalling, in his arms. And as the child had grown, so his love for her had grown too, quickly outstripping his lukewarm affection for Ernest, and the other two who came after.
She
was his if no one else was. His girl. His Mary. Of all the children only she it was who seemed truly able to reach his heart.

As she stood there the thoughts and memories came crowding in and she pictured Ollie as he had been when they had first met. He’d been beautiful – like those sculptures he’d taken her to look at that day before their marriage. That had been in the early spring of 1871. Nine years ago. And he hadn’t changed much, really. His body was still tall and strong, his face still good-looking, his corn-coloured hair still as thick, his eyes still as blue – bluer than any eyes she had seen before or since on anyone, except perhaps Mary. And yet, she thought, Ollie’s eyes were different now. Now they were without that spark that had been there, that reflection of promise. Though he was still young. Thirty-two years old. It was the poverty that was doing it to him, the responsibility of providing for a wife and children on the little he earned from his work on the gardens of Hallowford House and the little she brought in with the washing.

But why wasn’t it bearable for him? she asked herself. And the answer, she knew, lay in his dreams. If you had no dreams, no aspirations, then you could be content; there was no wanting to get in the way.

Turning her head, she gazed around her. On the top of the small chest of drawers she could see the little tin box holding Mary’s cheap paintbrushes and paints. There too were the magpie’s feather and the robin’s nest that Ernest had found, and the boat he had made for Arthur. Above the girls’ bed hung an oil-painting depicting people picking blackberries. A second painting, a still life of apples and flowers, done on an old piece of wood panelling, hung beside the door. Ollie’s pictures were all over the house – oil-paintings of all sizes done on bits of old canvas, boards and panels, paintings on which he lavished so much concentration and quiet passion in the few spare hours his working life allowed and when he could scrape together enough spare money for a paintbrush or the odd tube of paint.

It was that that had first attracted her to him, his passion for artistic things, a sensitivity that had made him different from the rest. And, she was sure, it was that same sensitivity – blunted now by circumstances – that had got in the way of any real happiness he might otherwise have found.

As she had been so often in the past she was touched now by the warmth of pity for his wasted talent. For he had talent, she was quite sure. And it was a
great
talent, possibly. But his painting could not be anything more than a hobby. Not now. There was no place in their lives for dreams of anything more grand, not now – if indeed there ever had been.

She could understand his resentment, though. And she could well remember how at the very beginning she had encouraged and shared his hopes. Yes, she had said, yes, she would help him in every way she could. She would help him earn the money for his materials, help him find the time to paint, to establish himself so that eventually he could leave his work on the land and make
a living from his painting. And together they would build the kind of life they wanted, with a good home, and, eventually, children.

The children, though, had come along first, and with their arrival fame and fortune had had to take a back seat. And so all those plans made in the earlier days had never become anything more than hopes – mere pipe dreams, and as substantial.

Sarah minded much less about their poverty than Ollie did; she’d known that for a long time now. Perhaps it was because she no longer had any real dreams of her own – for herself, anyway. In the face of day-to-day reality she tried to be content with that reality and as a result had come nearer to accepting her lot and resigning herself – perhaps too readily, she sometimes thought – and now sought her only happiness through her children. Not so Ollie. It was different with him. For him reality was something to be avoided.

She had had her own dreams once, though. With a good education from her English mother – once a schoolteacher – and a little grit from her Scots father, Sarah, orphaned at eighteen, had found herself a post as governess to a doctor’s children in Trowbridge. She had thought then that the whole world was open to her. She could marry anybody, she had told herself – shopkeeper, teacher, lawyer … But then in Trowbridge one morning she had met Ollie, a young man rich only in his dreams – and her own dream had changed; he had become a part of it.

Ollie had been a stockman then, caring for the cattle of a local farmer. It wouldn’t be for always, though, he had said; before too much time had passed he would have left the farm to set up on his own, as a painter of pictures. In those days his hopes had been untainted by experience and he had been certain that it would be only a matter of time before they became reality.

She could remember so well that moment when she had first realized the extent of her feelings for him. They had been walking in Trowbridge one Sunday soon after they had met. It was a winter’s afternoon and they had stopped to look in a shop window. Ollie, standing beside her, had taken his hand from his pocket and written something on the glass with his finger. She asked him what he had written, but, smiling, gently shaking his head, he had said, ‘Oh, no – can’t tell you that.’ When she had looked at the glass she had been unable to see anything, and a moment later he was taking her arm and they were moving away. But then, when they had gone just a few yards she had broken away from him and stepped back to the window. There, putting her face close to the pane she had breathed upon it and had seen appear the words:
Love me, love me, Sarah Keane
. In that moment any lingering thoughts of teachers, doctors or lawyers had vanished, disappearing in the cold air like the breath vapour from her mouth. She had known in that moment that she loved Oliver Farrar and would marry him.

The candle, burnt very low, sputtered once or twice, its suddenly flaring, wavering flame lighting up the shabby room so that the shadows danced and darted. She was aware of a pin escaping from her hair and falling onto her collar. She retrieved it and moved to stand before the small discoloured glass that hung on the wall beside the fireplace. Bending slightly she peered at the image before her. Her dark chestnut hair was woven into a thick, heavy plait coiled about the crown of her head and which now, following the blow from Ollie’s hand, had come loose. Setting down the candleholder on the mantelpiece, she took two or three more pins from her hair and readjusted the plait. In the feeble light she continued to gaze at her reflection. She looked her
thirty-one years, all right, she thought. Her face, once so pretty, was already settling into maturity, while the hand that brushed back the wisps of hair was rough against the softness of her cheek, irretrievably broadened, coarsened by the constant wringing out of wet washing; by endless hours’ immersion in water.

Her hands moved down her body. The growing child within her had not yet begun to change the shape of her belly. Soon, though, she would be all too aware of its presence, and then, come December …

And it was true what Ollie said: they couldn’t afford it; they couldn’t afford another demanding mouth to be fed, another body to be clothed. But they would have to; and somehow they would get by.

The cottages in Coates Lane were owned by John Savill at Hallowford House, a large Georgian house that stood a little less than a mile away to the southeast, on the top of Gorse Hill. Secluded from passers-by on the road, the house was set back behind immaculate green lawns, its wide front door approached by a carriage drive that led from tall wrought-iron gates and curved through and beyond a screen of trees, yew, rowan and flowering cherry. Built by John Savill’s great-grandfather in 1782, it was large and well-proportioned, its tall, elegant windows at the front facing out over the village in the valley, at the back over the yard, the stables, outhouses, formal and kitchen gardens, orchard and meadows.

John Savill was a wool clothier, owning one of the few remaining successful mills in nearby Trowbridge. He had married his wife Catherine, the daughter of a Bath solicitor, a little less than two years before; his first wife having died some five years earlier, the only child of the marriage, a daughter, dying in infancy. As the gentry went, John Savill was quite well regarded in the
village. For one thing he kept his servants much longer than did most of the other employers in the larger houses in the area, and also he had the reputation of being more considerate than most where his factory workers were concerned.

It was from the Savills that came all the money that entered the Farrar household. Ollie, on his marriage to Sarah, and with her encouragement, had given up working as stockman for a Hallowford farmer in order to take on the slightly less demanding job of assistant gardener to the Savills, at which time he and Sarah had moved into one of John Savill’s cottages in Coates Lane. As a stockman Ollie had had to work almost every day of the year, whereas the job of gardener allowed him all his Sundays off – days he could put to good use, not only in and around the cottage, but also at his painting. Sarah’s income from the Savills came by means of the laundry she did for them each week. She had been doing it for several years now, the washing being brought to the cottage regularly every Thursday by two of the Savills’ maids, the girls making the return journey with the laundry that Sarah had finished.

Like most of the other villagers, Sarah viewed the Savills with a mixture of awe and respect. Throughout her years of doing the household’s washing she had never had occasion to exchange more than a few words with Mr Savill – at which times he had been distantly polite – but with his young wife she had spoken several times and had taken a liking to her. Whereas Sarah had found the first Mrs Savill almost unapproachable in her imperiousness, the present Mrs Savill had shown that beyond the usual formalities that marked the difference in their stations there was a genuine warmth and understanding.

Now, this July of 1880, when the Savills’ maids had
come to the cottage with the week’s washing, Sarah learned from them that Mrs Savill was expecting her first child and that it would be born towards the end of January.

Soon after the maids, Emmie and Dora, had left to return to Hallowford House with the freshly ironed laundry Sarah herself prepared to leave the cottage. Just before the harvest season each summer Ollie would be taken from his work on the gardens to help with the haymaking in Mr Savill’s fields, and on some of the days during this time Sarah would take his dinner to him where he was at work. Now into a basket she placed half a loaf, a small basin of beef dripping, an onion, some cheese and a small flagon of cider. Then she called Mary, Arthur and Agnes to her – Ernest was out somewhere with his friends – and set off along the lane, up the hill and across the fields. It was an errand she undertook with pleasure, enjoying the walk and the chance to relax for a spell with the children and take a brief respite from the endless round of washing and ironing.