Turning the Stones (8 page)

I looked up with a sigh and, Lord love me, but there was the master again.

He stood stiff-necked with his head pulled in like a buzzard’s and one hand on his hip, the other resting on the knob of a tall cane that he had planted in the streaky green sea-mud. The long-legged spaniels were romping in the shallows, but he did not pay them any attention. He was looking out to sea in the direction of a laden barge. It was attempting to meet a punt that was coming out from the slip below the beer-house to offload the cargo. I was shy of the master, not only out of the deference natural to a gentleman of his standing, but because he always struck me as a sort of harrowed figure.

In fact, I found it quite painful even to be in his presence. Have you ever had such a sensation in proximity to another person? I mean where you simply cannot abide to be near them, because they depress your spirits so.

Downes, of course, inspires such melancholy in me, and Mrs Ladykirk in the haberdashery, too, and – who else? I have a strong aversion to Sutton, although I have hardly anything
to do with him. It is as though they press on my soul until it is bruised and smarting. Or perhaps it is only that I do not like these people because they do not like me and I reach for an overly abstract explanation to cover up the hurt I feel at that rejection. The master, for instance, has always held an antipathy for me despite my efforts never to cause offence.

At any event, in order to avoid him, I skirted around the back of the crowd of transit passengers who had gathered on the strand to watch the barge strive against the tide. I intended to climb up to the beer-house and set out on the path home, but the way was barred by a tall man swathed in a cloak, who was in conversation with one of the fishermen. He wore a three-cornered hat low on his head – it was a chestnut colour, I think – and boots of a style that we did not see in those parts. Were they French? I wonder. I might have asked the stranger to step aside so that I could go past, but I did not. I was very taken by his presence.

I heard him say in an unfamiliar accent, ‘What an awkward business. The punt goes at that barge like a drunken partner in a longways dance.’ The fisherman sucked on his pipe and said, ‘Aye, we are often troubled to bring cargo ashore. We have no quay here, sir, for we are not deep enough.’

I remember the stranger’s hair hung down in a long, wrapped queue, which seemed somehow soldierly. Standing at his back, I felt as protected as a defender behind a battlement and it seemed to me that he bore out my theory that people somehow project invisibly the essence of their nature. Just as the master had about him a rather sad little threadbare aura, this stranger shimmered with strength, and although I had not the slightest idea who he was, I felt drawn to him – or, should I say, charmed
by him in the sense of an operation of magic. To be near him aroused such interest in me that when he moved a little further down the strand, away from the general focus of the barge, I found myself at once trailing him.

I had the impression there was something definite on his mind that he meant to accomplish and that he was acting against the grain of the scene, which was something that appealed terribly to me. He struck me as an individualist. Perhaps I found that attractive because of my disposition to aloneness. In any case, I remember blushing violently as he turned. It seemed for a second as if he might notice me. Even now in the recollection my cheek feels heated. He seemed to be someone of experience, but I suppose he was not yet thirty years of age, perhaps even younger. He was somewhat dark in the face, like a man who spends his time outdoors – and he had not shaved that day. I hardly need to mention that he gave no sign at all of remarking the short, scrawny girl lingering in his wake. He was looking towards the southern end of the strand.

I watched him intently: the way he lifted his head with dawning interest to meet the puff of a breeze as it came off the waves, as if a useful idea had struck him. He had a gamesome aspect about him and at the same time he brought to mind stillness, not moribund haberdashery-stillness but a well of calm, while all else, the master, the frustrated passengers, the labouring cargo boats, was under pressure. Is that why I was drawn to him so?

A burst of applause sounded as the punt managed at last to clinch with the barge, the crew putting out grappling hooks to steady the two craft alongside one another. The master
attended closely as the boatmen went at their work handing chests from the barge to the punt. I suppose I was vaguely aware of rumours that the master’s business had become scattered and was not up to much, but I was too young at the time for them to signify, for I believed the Waterlands to be of infinite means. My gaze searched for the stranger again and found him in conference with the fisherman beside a skiff pulled up on the tide-line. The stranger then bent to the boat and helped the fisherman to haul a net from it.

All at once I felt a chill – something was amiss – and I cast a speculative glance around me. I expected to see trouble approaching. And there it was.

At the southern end of the strand I spied a trio on horseback and my keen eye recognised them even at that long reach. My immediate impulse was to warn the stranger of the approach of the customs man and his constables. I divined that this intelligence would concern him, but he was already absorbed in a course of action, making a beckoning gesture in the direction of the gawkers.

As the fisherman pulled up the hood of his holey jersey and stole away across the sand, I heard a shout of warning on the wind. Three men detached themselves from the crowd, which was still riveted by the fraught transfer of the cargo on the big swell, and ran to the skiff. In a trice, the stranger and his men hoisted the fisherman’s boat over their heads and with strong arms bore it away to the breakers. The stranger did not look away from his task, not even to see that the customs man and his constables had put the whip to their mounts. I dare say he judged that the heavy going would not permit the horses to come on at a gallop. He did not give the shore another glance.

I retreated to the crowd and watched the skiff push off, its occupants rowing strongly away, aided by the outgoing tide. The bystanders were not interested in the skiff. All eyes were on the punt and its imminent ungrappling – ‘I do wonder at the bearing of that weight upon yon punt,’ I heard someone say. ‘’Tis looking desperate burdened.’

Even as the customs man drew level with the churned sand that indicated the skiff’s launching spot, no one paid any heed. The pursuers were armed with pistols and I wondered if they would aim and fire, but the onlookers had pressed forward and a safe bead could not be drawn on the retreating men from among the crowd. As well, the heavily laden punt lolled on the swell like a floating hillock, providing cover for the escaping skiff. The customs man and the constables were further hampered by a contretemps, which occurred as a stout party on the barge made to transfer to the punt. As he raised his leg, the waves made an unfavourable shift and the bargeman landed awkwardly. In the vicinity of a spot we call the beer-house hole, which is the only deep water in those parts, his weight threw the craft off balance, allowing the sea to rush on to the punt. The boatman lost his pole and he and the bargeman both pitched overboard, followed by the master’s chests. At that moment, an oversized wave happened by, turned over the punt and ran away to the shore, leaving the men and the chests to flounder. It was a stroke of great bad luck for the master.

My gaze slid towards the customs men. The soft sea-mud had forced them to dismount. While the crowd shouted encouragement to the two men in the water, who were clinging to cork floats thrown from the barge, the chests were faring less well. They seemed determined to sink themselves.

I shaded my eyes to look downstream and saw that the skiff’s mast had been raised and a lug-sail was set. I remember hearing the rasp of the beer-house sign up on the promontory as the freshening breeze set it to swing. My heart lifted as if on a huge wave as the skiff disappeared behind a merchant brig anchored in the channel. When it appeared again as a receding smudge on the water I felt a sort of sorrow as if I, like that foolish, swamped punt, was in danger of overturning.

The breeze must have carried my scent to the master’s spaniels, because their muzzles went up and they bounded from the water. They lost no time in flushing me out from among the onlookers. Mr Waterland, sensing something close to hand that displeased him, tightened his shoulders. He spun round and fixed on me a stare that was in equal amounts frightening and frightened – as though I had rendered him aghast – before he turned abruptly away.

*

That evening, after Eliza had retired to her bedchamber, I came downstairs with her hat, thinking to trim it in the servants’ hall so as to keep it out of her sight until our birthday. My date of birth being unknown, Mrs Waterland has given me Eliza’s to share as a convenience. The ribbon and lace were still in Mrs Waterland’s parlour on the ground floor, where she had inspected them that afternoon and showed me how the ribbon must create a careless, trailing effect as though it had sprung loose during a game of high jinks and had been left unheeded.

I knocked timidly on the connecting door between the back stairs and the parlour. Finding no answer I was about to steal into the room to retrieve the trim, when I heard the mistress’s
voice cry, ‘Do not pursue me, sir! I have stopped my ears against you.’

At once I blew out my candle and held my breath in the darkness. I could tell by the approach of her voice and her footsteps that she had marched across the parlour and was standing close on the other side of the door. I longed to rush away, but I was afraid that the squeak of the floorboards might find me out for an eavesdropper.

The master shouted in a voice that was harsh and breaking, ‘You
will
attend my words, madam! Nothing has gone right since you brought that child here! Don’t you see how she causes our misfortune?’

‘A pox take your ravings!’ the mistress retorted. ‘She is nothing to do with it. How could you injure so grievously an entire shipment, and in front of the whole town, too?’

‘I tell you, she stood at my back and willed it to happen. The loss was designed!’

‘You mean like the fortune you promised me on our marriage. Gone, gone and never the fault of Bernard Waterland.’

‘God’s blood, Hetty, I have ordered you over and again to rid us of her. Now I will not—’

‘You may give me orders, Mr Waterland, when your account book warrants it.’ Mrs Waterland’s tone was haughty. ‘It is my money that keeps the wolf from our door. Your obsession with the past is an excuse for your own failure. Praise God we have a son to be man of the house.’

*

I stood in a wash of moonlight by the long table in the servants’ dining hall with the extinguished candle in my hand, my workbox under my arm and the master’s
Rid us of her!
resounding in my ears. His exhortation detonated in me the cold dread that lies dormant in the depths of any foundling: the fear of a return to the void. He brought that fear to the surface that day and ever afterwards I was to feel the precariousness of my position in the house.

Truth to tell, I was bewildered by this flaring-up of his dislike of me, since I was as a rule so much out of his way and I could not think what I had done to cause offence.

I could hear Abby in the scullery banging pots around and then she appeared with a stack of plates and began slotting them into the racks of the sideboard. She gave me a squinty look and asked why I was standing there like a stunned rabbit.

I rushed away to the butler’s pantry without giving her an answer. In the pantry I found Mrs Edmunds seated at her accounts and Hester Hart bent over a piece of green baize on the table, cleaning cutlery. Mrs Edmunds looked up irritably, the lappets of her old-fashioned cap dangling like a beagle’s ears, and told me to make haste with my work. I placed the hat on the table and slid into a seat next to Hester, who gave me one of her unintentionally baleful smiles. It is the lack of eyelashes that gives her such an air of hostility. The smallpox took them and left behind lumps on her cheeks like pellets embedded in the skin. Sometimes she bridles when you speak to her, even if you are only after the time of day, as if you have commented on her scars for your own amusement. But her hair is lovely. It likes to escape the confines of her cap. On such occasions Mrs Edmunds says that Hester ought to be ashamed of going about like such a trollop. But that fall of hair like honey syrup is the only portion of her beauty that the pox has left to Hester and it is determined to show itself.

I opened my workbox and brought out the yards of ribbon. As I guided a thread towards the eye of my needle, I glimpsed a shadow that made me start and my hands trembled and defeated my second attempt to thread the needle.

Hester said, ‘Yer making a right mess of that an’ all.’

Mrs Edmunds eyed me sidelong as if she had caught me sneaking a pie from the oven. She is as tough as an old boiling hen, and about the same size, and we are all cautious around her.

I threaded the needle at last, but then the strangest thing occurred. I had the impression that the velvet tangles had begun to rise and subside of their own volition as if they were slopping about in a laundry basin. But of course it was a trick of the senses. I was tired and the candle flames were wavering.

Mrs Edmunds said, ‘God almighty, what is it now, wench?’

I shook my head. The ribbon reminded me of something, but I could not remember what it was. It was like having a word on the tip of your tongue that will not utter itself. I found it awfully upsetting not to be able to plumb the deeper meaning of these yards of ribbon.

Then something rose in me like a big bubble coming up from under water and I burst out with, ‘The master does not like me! He wants to send me away.’

Hester said, ‘Huh. Ain’t we all waiting for the axe to fall.’

‘Shut it, Hart,’ Mrs Edmunds said. ‘And, Smith, stop wasting the light of a good candle and get on with it.’