The Whip (The Spaniard's Gift) Page 10

  So, much against the grain, Mrs Yorkless left things as they were. But she kept a sharp eye on her sons, warning them what would happen if she ever caught one of them talking to the hussy.

  Lizzie’s time was taken up cleaning the eight main rooms of the farmhouse, scouring the stone-floored pantries and store rooms, and helping with the cooking and curing. When she did manage to get outside it was into the fields because there were now only three of the four boys working, Dan the youngest of the family having two years previously contracted the chest complaint so that he now spent most of his time lying in bed in the back bedroom; only on days when it was warm and sunny did he venture outside, then he was wrapped up almost to the eyes in winter clothes.

  Should Emma happen to go round the back of the house she would always look up at Dan’s window, and should his pale face be near the pane she would wave to him and he would wave back. It was he who had first lifted a hand in salute, and she had answered it immediately, standing gazing up at the blurred image behind the pane. They could never have a word because the window was tight closed, but she often mouthed a message to him, mostly appertaining to the weather. If it was sunny she would point up to the sky, if it was cold she would hug herself.

  When he had been about the farm she hadn’t cared much for Dan for, like his brothers with the exception of Barney, he didn’t speak to her. And Barney only spoke when they met away from the farm, or they happened to be in either the byres or the barn and no-one else was there. And then his words were always stilted: ‘How are you, Emma?’ he would say, to which she would answer, ‘I’m fine, Barney. How are you?’ And to this he would answer, ‘Me an’ all.’

  Barney was a big fellow now. He and Luke were both about the same size, only Luke was a bit thicker in the shoulders and perhaps better looking; but he was still nasty. She couldn’t stand the sight of Luke; nor he of her apparently, for he always turned his head away when she was near. She hoped he would soon leave the farm for he was courting the verger’s daughter, Mary Haswell; she was seventeen and rather pretty. Her granny said the missis wasn’t for the match, Mary was too dollified and the verger and his wife had spoiled her, and that she would have to change her ways when she became a farmer’s wife.

  She never bothered about Pete. Pete was a dour kind of fellow. He didn’t talk much. Her granny said it was because he was the deep kind that took all in and said nowt, but he did what he was told without question. There was one man on the farm though that she was afraid of, even more than she had once been afraid of Luke, and that was the farmer himself. Like his son Pete, he, too, hadn’t much to say, but it was the way he looked at her. She always felt she had done something wrong when he stood looking at her. Sometimes he would turn away with a shake of his head. But a few weeks ago he had really frightened her. It was the morning after there must have been a liquor run for he came into the cowshed and his hair was all wet where he had been holding his head under the pump and he had almost knocked over the bucket of milk she had just taken from Daisy Bell. And he had gone to kick it; then realising what he was about to do, he had stopped and, putting his hand to his head, had stared at her, and as she looked back at him from the stool he had said something very strange.

  ‘You know what, you young Spaniard?’ he had said. ‘You’re going to cause more bloody upset and trouble than all the customs in the bloody country. You know that?’ And she had looked at him squarely as she answered, ‘I don’t cause any trouble, mister. I do my work and mind me own business; you can’t say I cause trouble.’

  He had seemed a little surprised at her stand and after a moment of gaping at her had muttered, ‘You’ve got a tongue like your granny. As for not causing trouble, you were made for trouble. Do you know that? You were made for it, cut out for it. Aye.’ He turned his head away now and he paused before he repeated, ‘Aye, cut out for it.’ Then he had walked up the byre, leaving her puzzled and frightened and feeling very exposed to whatever it was that emanated from him.

  Away from the farm she never felt frightened for she had got into the habit of carrying the whip with her. She always concealed it inside her skirt, the handle just visible above the waistband and in line with her elbow, the thong wrapped in such a way below the butt of the handle that it would unwind once she flicked it.

  From the time her granny had warned her to carry the whip she had practised whenever the opportunity presented itself, which was mostly late at night when the farm animals were bedded down and the members of the family inside. Then she would take the big whip out beyond the field and flick and twist and twirl the long leather thong until now she could almost, as her granny said, make it speak.

  It always amazed her that her granny liked to watch her antics with the whip. On the other hand, though, she didn’t like to see her practising with the knives. But there was really no place to practise the knives around the farm except for throwing them at the wooden beam that ran up the side of the cottage.

  It had taken her some long time to get the hang of throwing the knives. She tried to remember all that her father had done with them. But watching and doing were two different things: the art wasn’t only in having a good eye, it was in the strength of the wrist, and knowing how to use it. She had chipped a knife badly on the stone of the cottage during her early practising, but now she never missed the beam. It didn’t, however, give her enough scope, not like the oak tree in Openwood. But it was very rarely she had the time to visit Openwood in the daylight, and so it was only on a strong moonlight night that she could attempt to do any throwing.

  But if the weather held and it didn’t rain there would be a lovely harvest moon tonight, and she’d go into the wood and practise. She hadn’t been going out at nights very often. Sometimes she was too tired; once she lay down on her pallet she would be fast asleep and when the cock crowed at five o’clock in the morning she always felt she hadn’t slept for five minutes. What was more, a lot of the excitement had gone from her night strolls. When she first came here and had slept in this enclosed roof space she had imagined she would suffocate, and all she longed for was the open air. But now she had got used to being closed in. In fact, on winter nights what she enjoyed most was sitting on the mat in front of the cottage fire roasting potatoes in the ashes while her granny sat knitting in the rocking chair. Sometimes her granny talked and told her of things gone by and how it was when she was a young girl. It was then that her voice and manner softened, and she understood her more than she did in the daytime when for no apparent reason she would go for her, while warning her of dire things to come. Only last week she had cried at her, ‘’Tis a good job that parson’s getting married, ’tis that.’ Now why had she said that? And she herself hadn’t known the parson was going to be married. She had been surprised how the news had affected her; she had felt upset and when he had spoken to her after Sunday school and asked her what she thought of her latest reading by Sir Walter Scott, he had appeared to her just the same, not a bit as if he was going to be married. But how did you appear if you were going to be married?

  She was impatient this morning to get down to Mr Bowman’s to hear the latest news, because she could talk to Mr Bowman, ask him questions, just like she could the parson.

  She doubted, if the parson was going to be married, that he and Mr Bowman and herself would laugh together, like they did sometimes, for instance like they did over the parson finding the liquor store. Oh, how they had laughed about that.

  The parson and Mr Bowman had gone in the dead of night and moved the stone that bore the name of Christina Leadbeater on it and there, behind, was a flat slab and when they moved it, it showed a hole only big enough to allow one man through it. But there were three stone steps leading down into a goodly sized passage running well under the church, and on each side were stacked bottles of liquor, each one covered with a straw cap.

  They had replaced the stone that night, and the following day had decided on a course of action. At the bottom end of the churchyard there was a va
ult that held the body of John Freeman Ellis. It hadn’t been opened for years until the vicar went in when he first came to the parish. He had obtained the key from the vestry, and he still had it. Another quiet visit to the vault gave him the idea where he could store the liquor, and the very next night they transferred seventy-eight bottles, but left the straw covers standing as if there were still the bottles underneath them.

  It was almost a week later when the rumpus broke out in the village. It was kind of a secret rumpus but nevertheless evident. Billy had said to her granny there was one thing sure, it was somebody in the know, and when they found him, or them, because one man couldn’t do the job alone, he would be skinned alive.

  On that particular Sunday the parson preached a sermon on trust and on man loving his neighbour; he had used a lot of big words, and she’d had a hard job not to splutter.

  Mr Bowman had warned her not to let on to anybody, including her granny, about what had happened. Amidst laughter he told her that he had been very tempted to help himself to a few bottles, feeling he had deserved them for all the work he had put in. But then her granny had a nose, he said, and a mind for prying, so he had ended, discretion was the better part of rum valour!…The parson and he had laughed a lot.

  And they had all laughed until their sides ached when the parson described the looks on certain faces in the congregation as he admonished them to love their neighbours, knowing full well what their thoughts were regarding their neighbours at that present moment.

  She had taken the news to them the following week, having gathered from Billy’s and her granny’s conversation that it was suspected the culprits had come from The House, likely the butler and the footman or some high-up servants had got their heads together and now had their own private store of French brandy and Jamaican rum.

  It had come to Emma some time ago that Mr Bowman and the parson in some ways treated her as a grown-up, while other people treated her as a child, and those on the farm as the lowest form of servant. She had sometimes thought if it hadn’t been for the parson and Mr Bowman she would have run away before now. But then her good sense had asked her, to where would she run? To whom would she run? She had no-one, only the parson, Mr Bowman and her granny. But when it was summed up that was a lot. And she was thankful, oh yes she was, because as her granny had once said when in a temper, she was lucky that she hadn’t been brought up in the poorhouse over the bridge in Newcastle for then she would now be in the mines, for no matter how hard this Mr Ashley tried to stop the bairns going down he might as well try to spit against the wind, for the owners maintained the pits would close if the bairns’ labour was withdrawn. She didn’t know who this Mr Ashley was but he must be a nice man, and somebody high up too. And yet her granny only heard of him through Mr Bowman.

  Mr Bowman read the newspapers and he talked to himself about them, sometimes raging up and down the room when a thing didn’t please him. And when the parson was there they both talked ninety to the dozen. Sometimes about heaven and hell and things in the Bible. It was then that they would argue; but they generally ended up laughing.

  She had finished her morning chores and was ready to go down to Mr Bowman’s. She hurried across to the cottage and, going to the end of the room where a tin bowl stood on a block of wood, she took up a hessian towel and, having dipped the end into the water in the bowl, she wiped her face with it, rubbing well round her nose, the part of her that seemed to attract splashes of glar from the piggery. Following this, she took off her rough coarse apron and put on a white one, the hem of which reached to the bottom of her skirt. A bib was attached to the apron and she pinned the top to the shoulders of her blue serge dress near its frayed collar. She was feeling ashamed in this frock as it was no longer decent because she was growing so fast the hem didn’t reach the top of her boots and the sleeves were halfway up her forearms. But she consoled herself she would soon have a new one. Last November her granny had gone to the shoe fair in Gateshead and she got a big gentleman’s cloak and a lady’s blue cord dress for ninepence from a woman who was selling old clothes. Her granny had spent a good part of the winter turning the cloak into a working frock for her, and she said she would make a blouse of the lining. She wished she had started on the cord dress first because it was such a pretty colour: the material was very good, but the lady who had worn the dress must have walked through a lot of mud for the bottom of it was badly stained. Still, her granny said she would get more than enough to make her a Sunday frock. But it took a long time to make a dress and she had the thought that she would ask her granny to cut it out and she would get at the sewing herself, ’cos she wasn’t a bad hand at sewing, her stitches were nearly all the same size except here and there and when they went out of line it was mostly when the candle was guttered because of the wind coming down the chimney, or when she was dog-tired. Finally, she took a comb from the corner of the mantelpiece and combed the front of her hair under her white linen cap.

  She always felt a kind of elation when she went to Mr Bowman’s. It was like entering a different world. And it was a different world for she was beginning to liken her life at the farm as being in the house of correction where the warders had been struck dumb. Very often the only voices she would hear in the course of a day were those of the animals. She loved the animals, especially the pigs. Oh yes, she had a special feeling for the pigs. But children in the village called each other dirty pigs, yet she had found that pigs weren’t really dirty; they got wet and their feet churned up the ground into clarts, but they did their business in a special place. Oh, she liked the pigs, and she suffered agonies on slaughter day. Last year was the only time she hadn’t cried her eyes out. Instead, she had run to the far end of the chicken field and had stuffed her fingers in her ears to shut out their squealing; and she had prayed for them, prayed that they wouldn’t feel it. She could understand the mister and Luke killing the pigs but not Barney. But Barney always helped.

  She purposely made her way round the back of the farm this morning, and there she saw Dan at the window. She stopped a moment and smiled and waved her hand, and he waved back. His face looked smaller today. She was so sorry for Dan; he was going to die. It was awful to die when the sun was shining like it was now, so warm that it got right through your clothes to your skin.

  She half turned her head away and, looking upwards, she pointed to the sky, then looked back at him, and he nodded at her. He knew she was saying it was a nice day. She wondered why they didn’t let him outside when it was so warm; her granny said the fug in the room would knock you back and there was a nasty smell there, a kind of scenty smell that spoke of death. Poor Dan. She waved to him again, walking a few steps backwards as she did so; then she turned and hurried towards the wall and the beech hedge that cut off the yard. When she knew she would be out of his sight she slowed her step.

  She was finding it pained her to look at Dan yet somehow she felt that he needed company, outside company. She wondered where he would go when he died; would it be straight to heaven? Or would he have to suffer in hell for the things he had done, such as laying traps for the rabbits and the fox and clubbing half of Bonny’s litter with a wooden mallet? She had cried all night over that. Even when her granny had explained they only kept the best of a litter to be trained to look after the sheep, and what would they do with eight dogs running round the place.

  She would ask the parson where he thought Dan would go when he died.

  The parson was going to be married …

  She had just come in sight of the bridle path when she saw the parson. He was driving his horse and trap and seated beside him was a lady. She knew that he had espied her for he drew the horse to a stop, then hailed her with his hand.

  She was walking by the border of the field that was full of corn and she had to keep to the edge of it until she came to the bank and could drop down into the road, and she had to watch her skirt going down the bank because it generally rolled up to her knees. Then she was standing on the road looki
ng up at the parson and the lady. The lady was nearer to her. She was young and pretty, she had a round face and a pink skin, her eyes looked clear without colour and she had curly brown hair which showed under her bonnet. She wasn’t smiling.

  ‘This is Emma, Christabel. Emma, this is Miss Braintree.’

  Emma bent her knee, then said politely, ‘Good day to you, Miss Braintree.’

  Miss Braintree, besides not smiling, didn’t speak, she merely inclined her head. And the parson spoke again. His voice seemed extra loud to Emma; it was as if he imagined her to be in the middle of the field, and what he said was, ‘Emma’s a very bright girl, Christabel. She’s one of my brightest Sunday school pupils. She can read and write as well as I can and I’d like to bet she could get up in the pulpit and preach a sermon.’ He laughed, and Emma smiled, but with her lips tightly pressed, knowing that the parson was making a joke, but Miss Christabel Braintree still neither smiled nor spoke. And the parson now said, ‘You on your way to Mr Bowman’s, Emma?’

  ‘Yes, Parson.’

  ‘Well, you’ll find him in high fettle this morning, he has sold another one of your pictures. What do you think of that?’

  Her mouth opened widely now and she said, ‘’Tis good to know, Parson.’

  ‘Surely ’tis good to know.’ She knew he was imitating her way of speaking.

  ‘Well, we must be off and you on your way. I shall see you on Sunday, Emma.’

  ‘Yes, Parson. Goodbye, Parson. Goodbye, miss.’ She again bobbed her knee and the young lady inclined her head; and then the trap was bowling down the road.

  Funny, she had never opened her mouth, not even to say, ‘Pleased to be seeing you,’ or ‘’Tis a fine day,’ or anything like that. She was pretty though. But why had the parson been so hearty? She had never known him be so hearty, he must be pleased.