Turning the Stones (7 page)

Our scullery maid Abby Jenkins says that the Waterlands are so thwarted you would nearly think that a binding had been laid on them, although that is the kind of thing she is prone to say, since she is from Wales and they are known to be fanciful, the Welsh. You should have seen Abby when she first arrived at Sedge Court off the ferry from Flint. Her raven hair was wild and loose in the Welsh style and she wore a scarlet cloak and a round black hat like a man’s. Ten days passed before our housekeeper, Mrs Edmunds, could get her to lay that hat aside.

I wish I knew whether there was a difference between fate and a random concatenation of circumstances. And who is it that drives us forward? I should like to believe that we
ourselves, not God, nor the Fates, have the capacity to influence the actions of our lives, but I do not know how to explain persistent bad luck. For instance, many contrary events have occurred at Sedge Court and you could even say they had produced a pattern of misfortune – but is it possible to attribute them, as Abby insists, to an impost made by an unknown force upon the family?

There was a heavy atmosphere in the house during the winter that Abby came into service, which may have set the tone of her thinking. It was an atmosphere that pressed on the nerves of everyone except Mrs Waterland, whose sangfroid was unalterable in those days. Sedge Court has its share of cooped-up, squally temperaments. The master is a snappish man, who is never easy in the house, and Downes, it goes without saying, is always as cross as a sack of cats. But everyone was jumpy that winter, even Mrs Edmunds. It was an action of hers that causes a particular day from that time, late in February, I recollect, to linger in my memory.

As I came into the servants’ hall in the morning, bent on an errand for the mistress, Mrs Edmunds happened to be lugging a crock of milk from the still-room. At the same moment I glimpsed the kitchen cat, which was black and panicky, make a late decision to cut across her path. Our housekeeper is usually as unflappable as a fire shovel, but when the cat shot in error under her petticoat, she gave a shriek and let loose the crock of milk. The crock seemed to hang in space for a very long time before plummeting to its doom on the flagstones. The kitchen rang with a stunned silence.

Mrs Edmunds cried, ‘In God’s name how did that happen?’
as if it had taken a supernatural force to wrench the crock from her grip.

We stared in disbelief at the shards and spillage on the floor. In the background a joint at roast on the spit faintly seethed. Then a gob of fat fell into the dripping pan. I can still hear its hiss of disapproval. Mr Otty, who is otherwise the pattern of affability, cuffed Rorke’s ear and bellowed, ‘What in blazes are you gaping at?’ and Hester Hart burst untypically into tears. The cat, too, was confounded and dared not take advantage of the slowly dilating puddle of milk. Evidently overcome by the tension in the kitchen, she slunk into the scullery.

I think we were all of one mind about the incident: it was an affront to the accustomed order and somehow even ominous. Now that I am at a distance from the event, it is clear to me that my life was never the same afterwards. I did not absolutely understand at the time – I was not yet fourteen years old – that my position at Sedge Court was not entirely secure, but I believe I sensed even then that the long fuse of childhood was burning down to its annihilation.

I came out on to the driveway on that February morning in a state of sudden anxiousness, wondering why everyone was so on edge, and I recall looking back at the house a little fearfully, like someone fleeing a building rigged with gunpowder. Needless to say, Sedge Court simply sat there indifferent to my imaginings, calmly regarding its reflection in the lake. The house is built from the soft red sandstone that abounds in that part of the country, and if not as tremendous as Lady Broome’s mansion, Weever Hall, it is certainly substantial enough with its three storeys, a courtyard and many offices out the back. I will say, though, that the house always struck
me from the outside as looking surprisingly small or, rather, smaller than my experience of it. The interior, on the other hand, seemed to go on for ever in order to accommodate within, I supposed, the ballooning cargo of our lives and their accompanying emotions. I once relayed that observation to our governess, my dear Miss Broadbent, and she remarked in her quietly astute way that I had too much the sensation of things that are not there. There is a lake on the right-hand side of the drive as you look towards the gates. Well, Mrs Waterland called it a lake, but actually it is an old marl pit, one of the many meres and sloughs of our perforated countryside. We are very watery in our offshoot of Cheshire, you know. Waves lap at us continuously from the Dee in the west to the mighty Mersey at our backs in the east. From the north, the Irish Sea delivers any amount of storms and wrecks.

It was a chilly day and as I walked along I had the sense of being squeezed between petered-out winter and locked-up spring. Save for their trunks, which were smothered by dark creepers, the oaks and alders were bare – you could see the blotches of birds’ nests high in their branches. Last year’s grasses and brambles lay withered at the feet of leggy hedgerows and the daffodils seemed to be stuck, their points hardly showing above the ground. The only yellow in the world belonged to the French shoes that I was wearing. They had formerly belonged to Eliza. Their supple leather the colour of butter, their mannerly heels and winking buckles made me feel puffed up and important.

I walked westwards until I came to the intersection of Wood Lane, where the rolling fields decline towards the shore a quarter of a mile away. From that vantage point I could see
the vague outlines of several tall-masted ships congregating at anchor downstream on the lacklustre waters of the Dee. Miss Broadbent once told me that our ancestors worshipped the rivers of this land – but if the Dee is a god, then it must have been offended in some way, because it shrinks from us and prevents us from flourishing.

The hush of the morning was disturbed by a gang of big black-backed gulls. They came swaggering up from the estuary, elbowing finches and warblers out of the way, and wheeled low over my head, screeching their usual prophecy of bad weather. The sky, however, looked quite harmless except for a dirty cloud loafing above the Welsh hills on the far side of the river. Then I remarked the source of the gulls’ hubbub. There were several buzzards approaching from the north. They sidled up to the field on the corner of the lane, where drovers sometimes park their animals before taking them to the market at Great Neston, and hovered in a sinister manner. I parted the branches of the hedge to see what had attracted them and discovered a sheep felled by the burden of itself. Its wool had become waterlogged for lack of grease and the poor thing had keeled over in the mud.

The remainder of the daggle-tailed flock lurked uselessly in a corner of the field, their heads turned away as if embarrassed by their fellow’s plight, chagrin their only weapon against the buzzards. I guessed that the drover was probably taking his ease in the beer-house at Parkgate. The sheep exuded helplessness. I was sorely vexed at it for slumping there under its fatally heavy fleece, which meant I must ruin my shoes in order to set it to rights, if that were even possible. At that moment a sparrowhawk fluttered on to a nearby sycamore
branch and perched quietly, waiting, and I thought, well, I must try.

I removed my shoes and stockings, hitched up my skirts and squelched across sloppy grass pockmarked with the imprints of hoofs. As I approached the inert animal, a foul miasma climbed out of the wool and rose to welcome me odiously to its host’s death – for I saw as I came closer that I was too late to be of any assistance. Froth was bubbling at the corner of the black mouth and the bleary eye oozed dark liquid. Before my gaze the creature’s life leaked away and the flank fell still beneath the dun-coloured coat. The eye filmed, the lower lip subsided into an awful grimace that exposed brown teeth. I shouted at the buzzards, waggling my arms at them like a bugbear, but they continued lazily to circle the field, laughing under their dark-fringed wings, I imagined, at my futility.

I hastened downhill towards Parkgate and swung past the master’s storehouse and granary. The pens behind the beerhouse were empty. They usually heave with cattle swum ashore from the Irish boats, but there had been no landings for nearly a fortnight. The conditions were still light, I recall. The beer-house’s sign barely creaked and a backlog of passengers was hanging around outside the booking office. Parkgate is the terminal for traffic to Dublin and people are always twiddling their thumbs there, awaiting the caprice of the winds. The beer-house stands hard against the shore on a projection. The sight of it at full tide looking like a ship on the waves always makes my heart swell. I get the impression that it is trying to launch itself seaward, in spite of its landlubberly nature, as if yearning to be other than what it is.

I followed the road past the pawnshop and its embarrassment of riches – the casualties of slack air are always having to give over their valuables for the price of another night at the inn – past the fishermen’s carts piled with sacks of shellfish. Parkgate’s shops and merchants’ houses form a barricade between the sea and the hinterland. The buildings are tall and high-shouldered as though tensed for an onslaught that must arrive sooner or later. Which, of course, it does. In bad weather waves charge up on a high tide, hurl themselves across the road and pound at doors and windows.

The thoroughfare hugs the shore as far south as Moorside Lane and the herring house. There tend to be excited gannets and terns down at that extreme, flapping around after scraps, and straggly girls hoping for work gutting and salting the fish. At the customs house, where they register imports, the road heads inland, but I do not like that turn-off. A gibbet stands there. Last summer Eliza asked Mr Otty to take her to watch the remains of a wretch being cut down, hanged for robbing the customs house. He was a local lad, too. But Mrs Waterland would not allow her to be seen gawping.

All at once I came to an abrupt halt. Some half-dozen yards ahead a familiar figure was emerging from a doorway. There was no mistaking the shape of the master. He is as longitudinal as a pair of tongs. He was wearing a coat the colour of snuff, his breeches tied over his knees in a countryman’s style above black stockings, and that repugnant wool wig that Mrs Waterland used to beg him to leave off. He would always defend it, saying it was durable and a roof against the wet. He had come out of the shop that Theo Sutton kept beneath his house then. Folks said that Sutton sold goods under the counter that had
been confiscated by the customs man, rum and suchlike, and hair powder and soap, but I can’t imagine that the master ever had any interest in those things. He has never been a man for luxuries or jaunting. He is a very separate kind of person. I don’t believe he likes human company at all unless you count a murderously prolific wildfowler from Burton called Georgy Bird with whom he used to go out hunting.

His boisterous gun dogs, two liver-and-white springer spaniels, were jumping around on the edge of the strand dismaying the birds. He adjusted the grip on his cane, shoved his hat under his arm in that twitchy manner he has, called the dogs and began grimly to walk in my direction. I could picture the fierce gaze under the shaggy balcony of his eyebrows, and the working of his mouth, which he tightens like a person biting a lemon or someone trying to suppress a bout of weeping.

I retreated along a weint – that is, one of the narrow lanes that run between the big houses and lead to the maze of backstreets where the sea-folk live – and found myself in a noisome clearing. The sea breeze that drives the worst of the herring-house stink from the parade does not reach the jumble of shoddy cottages in the hindquarters of the town, their half-bald, mostly rotten thatch adding its own note of decay to the general stench. Dingy barefoot children in flitters sprawled at every door and a couple of hungry-looking curs crept towards me with their ears back and haunches up. The faces of the children were wild and sharp and the older ones leaped up and grinned at me with a sly glint. I fancied that they took me for an opportunity on which they were prepared to pounce.

Someone threw a stone. It hurtled from a dark aperture in
the scaly wall of one of the hovels and banged against a herring barrel. Stifled laughter sounded from inside the hovel and then a chute of grey water, a pail emptied by an unseen hand, shot from a door and landed
splat
at my feet like a challenge. I fled the way I had come, one of the mongrels snarling at my heels, until a squawk-voiced fisher-child called it off. I bolted past the Sutton house with my head down and fetched up outside the haberdashery, from where I directed a furtive look back along the thoroughfare. To my relief the master had vanished. As I recovered my breath, I noticed that my shoes had suffered a sorry loss of allure, marred by mud and water-splash.

In her customary manner the haberdasher, Mrs Ladykirk, was roosting at her counter under a feathered cap with two winged protuberances above the ears that suggested a hen surprised on its nest. She regarded me with indifference as I stirred boxes of hairpins and false flowers, flipped through cards of trims and tickled bouquets of plumes dyed violet and madder. In the awful stillness of the shop, with its flaxy odour of the linen-press, cabinets scaled the walls nearly as far as the ceiling, their innumerable drawers and compartments containing multitudes of miniature items, pins, needles, threads, thimbles, bobbins, buttons, hooks, measures, scissors, in relentlessly ongoing allocations. The cabinets lorded it over sectioned tables, where ribbons, ruchings, fringes, flounces, nettings and knots vied for attention.

I had left the door open and I could hear the rustle of waves across the way subsiding dreamily upon the shore. Spotting at last a spool of velvet ribbon that answered to Mrs Waterland’s instructions, and a frill of Belgian lace, I bought the trims in a silent transaction.

I set off along a dark border of damp sand above the receding tide, wending my way among the shrimp boats beached on the shingle and the fishermen repairing their nets and their pots. Curlews and oystercatchers feinted at the waves and the breeze buffeted my hat and bloated my mantle. Mrs Waterland makes pretty things out of pretty things and I scanned the sand for some little treasure, an intriguing shell or a hank of shapely seaweed, in an effort to please her. Although I searched the shore with extreme intent, I came all the way back to the precinct of the beer-house without finding a single item that might pique her interest.