Stone Cradle (12 page)

My attempts to fashion ringlets had come to naught and I had tied my hair up with my usual velvet ribbon, but it was a windy
summer’s day and already strands were escaping and sticking to my face.

As soon as I see him, I’ll know, I thought, as I approached his wagon. I’ll know, from the look on his face, whether he feels the same as me.

There was no one by the green and gold wagon. The door and shutters were firmly fastened. I glanced about but could not see him. Disappointment washed over me like cold, dirty water. If his smile had meant something, then he would have been there the following week, surely, to see me again.

I hovered around longer than was decent and soon noticed a group of three women at the neighbouring wagon, staring at me. Was I imagining it, or were they laughing at my expense?

I went over. One of them I recognised. She gave me her rent and then some extra, nodding at the green and gold wagon. ‘This is from them. They’ve gone to Long Stanton.’

Long Stanton. Never had Long Stanton sounded so far away. I took the money and turned.

The last wagon I visited was that of Mrs Boswell. She gave me the rent and watched me tick my book, then handed me a small parcel, wrapped carefully in brown paper and tied with ribbon. ‘This is for you, Miss Rose,’ she said, ‘to be opened in the privacy of your own room.’

I looked at it, then back at her. She had already turned away.

When I got back to the house, I was burning to run up to my bedroom and open the parcel. Could it be a message or a gift from him? But why would he leave it with the Boswells? I knew I had to do the books immediately and take the reckoning to my stepfather, then get on with making supper. Then there was an evening of silent sewing to endure.

It was not until bedtime that I was in my own little room with the door locked behind me. I took the small parcel from my pocket and
held it up to the candle on my windowsill, to regard it properly in the soft, yellow light.

I could hardly bear to open it. When it was opened, I would know what was inside and was bound to be disappointed. A gift. I bit my lip as I looked at it, for I was realising that, since my mother had died, nobody had given me a gift. Not one. Birthdays were not acknowledged in our house, and even Christmas was marked only by a dinner of goose, cooked and served by me, as all the farm duties still had to be done and Father did not believe in excessive celebration. I think one year I had an orange from William.

Eventually, I slipped off the narrow blue ribbon and unfolded the brown paper.

Inside my little parcel was a brooch of some cheapish metal in the shape of a sunflower, with a boxed clasp, and a long, fine chain attached. At the other end of the chain was a slender grip, fastened by a clasp, which you slipped along its length. It was a tawdry thing, somewhat worn and old-fashioned, but practical, and it brought a lump to my throat. Even if it was Mrs Boswell’s own and not bought, she had folded it and wrapped it and tied it with ribbon. She had told me to open it in my room because it was a woman’s thing, a thing a man could not know about or understand. I sat holding the skirt grip beneath the candlelight and wept for my mother and for all the things she might have said or given to me as I became a woman myself, if she had been given the chance. I wept for her as I had never wept before.

It was that night, in the dead darkness before dawn, when I was sound asleep and wallowing in dreams, that Elijah Smith threw little sticks against my windowpane.

The sticks themselves did not awaken me – I only knew what he’d thrown when I found some of them on the windowsill. I was woken by the barking of the dog, Eddie, in the yard. By the time I
got to the window and raised it, Eddie’s racket had frighted him off. I was just in time to see Elijah leap the fence – no more than a glimpse in the moonlight, but enough to recognise him by.

I watched the shape of him be swallowed by the darkness. So I was not deluded, after all.

I
t wasn’t much of a wedding – I have to own that now, although at the time I was so cheerful that we had pulled it off that what was missing hardly mattered. I told Elijah I wanted it done properly in St Matthew’s Church, so we had to wait for the banns to be read. We went to church for each of those Sundays, and my heart sang as the vicar announced our names for the whole wide world to hear – oh, I wanted every man, woman and child in the country to know I was to be wed.

Elijah proposed to me exactly three weeks after he threw sticks at my window. We were lying on the bank behind the Traveller encampment. It was the fifth time we had managed to be alone together.

It was early evening. The sky had already lost its goldenness and was taking on the purplish, slightly sickly hues of dusk. It was making me sad. I dreaded having to return to the farmhouse and was telling him so. By then, he knew everything about my stepfather and brothers, about the strange behaviour of Horace.

‘Sometimes I think I will go mad if I spend one more night there,’ I was sighing.

‘Come away with me, then.’

I looked at him. He was lying on his back with his hands behind his head, chewing on a piece of long grass and looking at the sky.

There had been no pause before he said it, and it was lightly said. You might have thought he was suggesting,
How
about
a
cup
of
tea?
I sat up and looked down at his face, searching for some sign of the weight behind his words, but his eyes were shut and the rest of his face remained closed too. After staring at him for a moment or two, I was none the wiser.

When I did not answer him, he opened his eyes, looked up at me squintingly, and repeated the suggestion. ‘Come
away
with me, and when you’re mine, there won’t be a man in this world but me has a right to lay a finger on you.’ He put one hand on my sleeve. ‘You’ll be my Rosie, for good. And that will be it, my girl.’

Within a space no longer than a few tickings of a clock, I moved from thinking,
how
absurd
to thinking,
yes.

How could I possibly run away with Elijah Smith and just leave everything?

Well, what, precisely, would I be leaving? I had very few possessions and no money, my stepfather had seen to that. The only thing I valued was a gold chain my mother left me which I wore round my neck day and night, so that was easy enough to take along with me. I only had that because she had given it to me herself when she became ill. She must have known by then I would get nothing from the farmer. That and the skirt grip Mrs Boswell had given me were the only possessions I valued in the whole wide world.

The farmer. My stepfather. I thought of his fury when my departure was discovered, and that of the dreaded Horace. And then I thought – and I must confess this gave me no little pleasure – of how affronted my stepfather would be to have a Travelling man for
a son-in-law, of how he would have to lie about it to his Alderman friends and always wonder if his lies would be discovered. We might not mix much with the local people but that didn’t mean we wouldn’t be worth gossiping about.
Have
you
heard
about
what
the
Childer
girl
has
gone
and
done?
She’s
run
off
with
a
Gypsy!
Oh my, how it would wound him and Horace to have that whispered. That wouldn’t do much for their marriage prospects.

I looked at Elijah. He was a handsome man, with his crooked teeth and smile that made me dizzy. I thought about him all day long. If I saw him talking to somebody else, man or woman, I felt ill because he was attending to them, not me. We had kissed three times and each time it was like drowning. When he had his mouth on mine, I forgot the rest of the whole world. I forgot I needed air to breathe.
Put
your
hands
on
me,
I wanted to say. He had been quite polite so far. He had held my head, and stroked my face, that was all.

I had never been touched tenderly by a man before and it was as though I had discovered some extraordinary secret. I burned with it, in places where I had not realised it was possible to burn.

I loved him, but I knew nothing of him, really. He might abandon me, for all I knew.

‘I’ll not give myself to you until we’re legally wed, you know that, don’t you?’ I said boldly to him, and he replied with a broad grin, for he knew that meant I was going to agree.

‘I know that, girl.’

‘But where shall we go to?’ I already had a feeling that the practicalities of this matter would be down to me.

‘Let’s go to a town,’ he said, ‘for I’ve had enough of fields and mud for the time being.’

‘We can go to Cambridge,’ I replied. ‘I have an old friend of my mother’s there and we can stay with her while we find our own little house.’

He frowned and stroked his chin. ‘A house? So you’re going to
make a proper
gorjer
of me, are yer?’ Then he smiled again. ‘You had better make me some fancy clothes if I’m going up in the world, my girl.’

‘I can sew well enough.’

He stood. ‘Better go and pack your things then, girl.’

I must confess I felt a little dissatisfied as I crept back to the house, for in truth I had always imagined that when a man proposed to me it would be with great protestations of love; but I already knew that Elijah was not a man for great protestations of any sort, and that was something I would just have to get used to.

I may not have had the romantic side of a proposal but I had something just as good – the excitement of running off. I hugged it to me. I was going to pack my things and run off in the dead of night and my stepfather and stepbrothers who thought they owned me were going to wake in the morning and find I had slipped from their grasp.

I should have left them a vicious little note, something about how they would have to boil their own milk from now on – but in truth I was too afraid to do it, and reckoned the empty bed they would discover in the morning would speak for itself.

Our arrival in Paradise Street must have caused a small stir, I think; given folk something to talk about. There had been no means of warning Aunt Lilly we were about to show up on her doorstep, and I had not had any contact with her for years. We just showed up one afternoon. Standing on her doorstep, waiting for her to answer the door, was almost more frightening than running away from River Farm in the dark, wondering what on earth I would do if Elijah and his horse were not waiting for me at the end of the lane.

The door opened, and there was Aunt Lilly, scarcely changed from when I had last seen her eight years previous – apart from the fact that she had taken to dying her hair orange. A look of
puzzlement, then curiosity, crossed her face. Then her hand went to her mouth and she gave a cry of recognition. She stared at my cloth bag, and Elijah standing beside me, then she shook her head and pulled a face both tragical and comic, lips pressed together and mouth wide, like a duck. I couldn’t work out if she was pleased or not.

She stepped back from the door, turned her head slightly and called out, ‘Samuel, Samuel, come here directly.’

Samuel Empers came to the front door slowly. He had aged much more than Lilly.

Lilly turned back to me. ‘It’s Emmeline’s girl. Our Rose,’ she said, as if I might be the one in need of reminding who I was. She opened her arms.

They gave us tea and we discussed where Elijah might lodge. She had a nephew over at Old Gas Lane who owed her a favour or two – and there was a small stables and yard behind his place where we could put the horse and Elijah would be handy to care for it. We told her Elijah was a horse-dealer and general trader, and she knew well enough what that meant. I saw her looking a little askance at him but thought, ah well, she’ll get used to the idea.

Elijah didn’t say much during this first encounter. It was strange to see him quiet and unsure of himself. He did not know whether to sit or stand and clutched his cup of tea like someone drowning. He kept glancing over at Samuel Empers, as if he thought the man of the household might help him out, but Samuel Empers was always entirely ruled by his wife so Elijah had no assistance from that quarter. When it was decided that Samuel should walk him over to Gas Lane, Elijah leaped to his feet in gratitude and gave me no more than a nod before he was out of the door.

We all retired as soon as Samuel returned from safely stowing Elijah. It was agreed that I was to sleep in their bed, with Aunt Lilly,
and poor Samuel deposit himself on the settee downstairs. There was nowhere else in those little houses. I had gone out of my way to ensure they knew Elijah and I would not be a burden to them – we would wed as soon as we could, and find our own little house to rent. Exactly how we were going to support ourselves was a matter we did not discuss.

The only awkwardness came as Lilly and I were in the bedroom, preparing for sleep. We had performed our ablutions. I was sitting up in bed, beneath the quilt, and Lilly was wrapping papers around locks of her orange hair, one by one, and pinning them to her skull.

We were talking of my mother.

‘And where is she buried?’ Aunt Lilly asked, as she licked her comb and pulled it gently through a section of hair.

‘Cottenham,’ I replied. I hesitated. ‘It was a small funeral. Just the family.’

Aunt Lilly stopped what she was doing and looked at me. ‘I only heard of your mother’s death from another farmer. Mr Cooper at Chatteris Fen Farm.’ She looked down at her lap. ‘He was bringing in radishes that year, although I think he’s now moved over to sugar beet.’

‘Mr Childer did not write to you?’ I had always wondered why I had never heard from Aunt Lilly after my mother died.

Her face grew grave. ‘He did not, my dear. I wrote to him, however, after my conversation with Mr Cooper. I offered to have you. We should have – well, Samuel and I not having our own.’

I stared at her.

She lifted her arms to apply another paper to her hair, then let them drop. ‘Perhaps I was clumsy in my letter – I am not good with words. He stopped supplying us after that.’

We lay next to each other in the darkness, Aunt Lilly and I, but for a long time after she began to snore, I could not sleep. I was turning
over in my mind my stepfather’s wickedness. Of course he did not want to send me back to East Cambridge. He did not want to lose an unpaid servant. No wonder he stopped supplying Aunt Lilly. He wanted nothing more to do with her.

After I knew this, I began to regret my cowardice in having run off from River Farm without giving my stepfather a piece of my mind. I wanted to hurt him back for all the hurt he had caused me. I should have liked to have written him a letter in which I told him exactly what I thought of him, but in truth, I was still too afraid of him to do it – I was not fully of age, after all. What if he came after me and tried to take me back to the farm?

After a week or so in Paradise Street, I thought more calmly and realised that if he and Horace were going to try and get me back they would have done it by now. No, he had washed his hands of me, probably assumed I had lain beneath a hedge with Elijah and become a
gipo
on the spot. The more I thought about it, the more wounded I felt that they were not even bothering to enquire after me. I bet he’s already forbidden his sons to mention my name, I thought bitterly, as if I never existed.

So I wrote to William instead. William was the only person I regretted leaving behind at River Farm. I knew he would find it hard without me. Without a woman to bully, the men in that house would turn upon the weakest among them. And pride came into it, a little. I wanted William to know that I wasn’t sleeping in a gutter somewhere, that I was going to be a decent married woman. I didn’t want him to think badly of me, and I suppose if I’m honest I was hoping the information would leak out to the rest of the family, then, whatever else they thought of me, there was at least one bad thing they would not be able to think.

So, soon as we had a date fixed for the wedding, I wrote to William, telling him the where and the when. I said he was welcome to come and give me away if he liked, as I regarded him as
my nearest male relation. I don’t know whether he ever got the letter safely – perhaps my stepfather intercepted it – but either way he never showed up at the church. Elijah and I were married in front of Aunt Lilly and her Samuel, and two new friends of Elijah’s. More of them later.

At least the sun came out, as bright and cheery as a blessing from the whole wide world, as if to make up for the fact that Elijah and I had not a single relative between us to see us intertwine our lives. As we walked out of the gloom of St Matthew’s Church, it was as if the whole street was bathed in light. We all stopped on the steps and beamed at each other.

We were doing the whole thing on the cheap, of course. We had to borrow for the marriage licence, which was a lot more than either of us had expected and there was no chance of a gold ring or anything like that – we used a cheap dress ring of Lilly’s – but honestly I didn’t care. It was in a church and it was legal, just like my mother would have wanted for me.

Then, as we made our first move down the steps, the church bells began to ring. We all looked up at the blue sky, amazed, as if the peals were coming from heaven itself. Lilly cried out, ‘Now, isn’t that lovely!’

I hadn’t expected any extras like that. I turned to Elijah and said, all happy about it, ‘Where did you get the money for them to ring the bells? I didn’t know I was getting that!’

If he had had any sense, he would have just smiled and got the credit but instead he shrugged and said, ‘I didn’t know they would be rung.’ I could see he was as surprised as me.

‘Aunt Lilly?’

‘Don’t be daft!’ she laughed.