All the dear faces Page 18

  But Blackie and Bonnie did not back off. They stood their ground, young as they were, and it was not until the man, with a slight movement of his hand, commanded his own animal to lie down, that order was restored. The two young dogs, with the enthusiasm of youth, were still inclined to bristle, but they lay down too, one on either side of Cat, evidently deciding that, being the youngest and smallest, she was the most in need of defending.

  Phoebe stood up when Annie did, the strips for the swill baskets scattering about their feet. The man was evidently under the influence of some strong emotion which he was doing his best to submerge and the only way he seemed able to do so, was by hiding it under another, that of anger. He threw himself from his horse, leaving it standing about untethered, its eyes wild and dangerous, or so Phoebe thought, glad it was on the other side of the wall as the man tore his way through the gate, almost taking it from its hinges.

  “So it's happened, then," he snarled. "You wouldn't be told, would you? My warnings were completely ignored whilst you flaunted yourself about the parish as though you were invisible and therefore in absolutely no danger from the ruffians who hang about looking for women like you who are foolish enough to think they are immune to such ... "

  “Reed Macauley, would you mind telling me what the devil you're talking about. And I'd be obliged if you'd not come charging into my . . ."

  “I'm talking about you . . . your . . . dammit, Annie Abbott, can you not take more care? Do you have to stride about the countryside after dark . . .”

  His face worked strangely and in his eyes was the most dreadful, haunted expression, one which Annie could not decipher. It contained anger, yes, and a curious fear, a dread which was completely foreign to his arrogant nature. There was something deep, something he was trying to hide. A different emotion to the others, soft, vulnerable, protective, unwelcome.

  She began to understand.

  “It's all they can talk about in my kitchens, apparently, and not just in my kitchens, but in everyone else's it seems, the foolish carryings-on of a woman they believe is no better than she should be and therefore, so my housekeeper informed the housekeeper of an acquaintance of mine, who told me, can it be surprising, they are saying when she gets what she asks for. Smirking he was, the man who told me . . . and . . . and . . .”

  He stopped and ran his hand across his face, pushing it through his hair, the raw and naked anger in him humiliating him since he did not really understand it. His eyes glared savagely into hers. Annie had the most absurd desire to move towards him and take that hand, to bring it to her lips and brush the back of it tenderly, to comfort him and smile, as she would to a child who has been pushed too far and has lost its temper.

  She must have smiled for the snarling blackness of his rage and fear became deeper. He moved closer to her so that they stood face to face.

  “It amuses you, does it, madam, to be interfered with by some drunken old sot, or were you yourself so deep in your cups it scarcely registered? Two sodden toss-pots falling down behind a barrel, so I was told and taking pleasure from one another or perhaps he was a customer ... “

  He was not quite quick enough to catch her arm as she lifted it to strike him, perhaps too incensed, too crazed with his own boiling emotions to see the sudden ferment of hers. The crack of her hand across his face jerked his head to one side and brought all three dogs to their feet, but it also brought him to his senses, and again he controlled his older, more experienced animal with a gesture of his hand. The violence in the air was a palpable thing, affecting not only the animals, but the two incensed humans.

  “Down, Blackie, down, Bonnie, " Annie managed to shriek flinging out her arms to her own trembling animals.

  “Take the dogs inside, Cat, and you, Phoebe, go with her, now, go on.”

  Cat was crying, great fat tears rolling down her cheeks but she allowed Phoebe to take her into the house, each dog dragged reluctantly by the scruff of the neck over the threshwood and the door closed firmly on the still, cold, silent, menacing figures of the man and woman.

  Their eyes were locked, unblinking and without expression. Neither seemed able to look away. They were both breathing deeply as though they had been running and whereas Annie's face was flushed, Reed's was white and drawn except for the imprint of her hand across his cheek.

  “What did he do to you?" His voice was harsh and painful.

  “Nothing."

  “Nothing? Stripped you naked and threw you down behind a barrel, I was told. It's all over the parish and when I came back from Lancaster, it had even reached the inn at Penrith."

  “And you believed it?"

  “What else was I to do? You . . . take no care. I've been expecting something like this ever since I first saw you last November, striding away towards Blencathra with nearly twenty miles in front of you . . . and . . ."

  “It was not I who was . . . and if it was, why should it concern you?”

  His voice stopped its desperate tirade, cut off in mid-sentence and his mouth fell open, slack and somewhat foolish.

  “What?"

  “I was not the one attacked, though I dare say it suited those in the parish who wish it had been to believe it was. I was involved so therefore it must be me, the Jezebel, who got her come-uppance. No more than I deserved for hanging about an ale house late at night. It doesn't matter to them that I have to earn my living . . ."

  “Not you?" In his voice was a mixture of gladness and at the same time a ferocious hostility. She was nothing to him; he had told himself so a dozen or more times. Could be nothing to him, and yet the anguish which had torn at his heart, moving it frighteningly in his suddenly constricted chest when her name was mentioned, with the implied word of 'rape' affixed to it, not only frightened him, twisting his sound common sense until he was bewildered by it, but ran like explosive fire, angry and uncontrollable in his veins. Why did she not stay at home — safe — where other women stayed? Quiet and self-effacing, making no sound, creating no disturbance, causing no gossip, giving rise to nothing which would reach his ears, therefore allowing him to forget her? To put her out of his life as though she did not exist. Instead she seemed to be always up to something, doing something contrary, displaying her beauty and her careless disregard for those who lusted after it, or despised it and her, so that her name seemed to be on everyone's lips. She should never have come back, they said, flaunting herself and her bastard, or if she had been forced to it, she should have sold the farm and taken herself off into obscurity where no one knew her. Instead she had been seen everywhere decent people went, begging work and showing no sign of contrition, making it quite clear she thought herself as good as anyone and equally clear that she was not only not going to be driven away, but was to stay and work the farm her father had left her. A hussy, and worse still, a hussy who showed no remorse and could you wonder that men considered her fair game? Even the acquaintance who had slyly told Reed of her brush with the vagrant in Keswick had thought so and had been visibly astonished when Reed, cutting through his lustful ramblings on what he would like to do to Annie Abbott should she cross his path, had walked rudely away.

  He drew in his breath and his mouth tightened into a grim line. His jaw was set dangerously and his eyes were a pale, flinty blue, but in them was a tiny prick of warmth, soft and grateful, a thanks of some sort to whoever, whatever it was that had protected her this time. He did not know it was there but she saw it and her own face became gentle.

  “It was the girl."

  “The girl?"

  “Phoebe. She has just gone inside with Cat. She had been at the Hiring Fair, but for some reason no one took her and she was left to fend for herself. The man demanded her money and . . . well, you can guess the rest. I happened to be handy so I stopped him.”

  He grinned then. It was like the sun turning the pewter-grey waters of the lake to burnished gold, light, rippling, merry. His teeth were a white slash in his brown face and his eyes became the loveliest, brightest blue. An eng
aging grin, infectious, making her own lips curve into a smile for she knew exactly what was in his mind.

  “He won't fancy a woman for a long while," she went on and her eyes narrowed into gleaming slits of pure, golden joy.

  “I bet he won't.”

  They began to laugh, the sound lifting on the soft, rarified air, lilting and filled with such gaiety, the dog at his feet cocked her head and pricked her ears in mystification.

  “You kicked him in the . . . ?"

  “I did. He should have trouble walking for a while, I should think, never mind anything else.”

  The door opened a crack and the white, anxious, puzzled face of Phoebe peered through it, her own pale blue eyes round and uncertain. Annie turned and held out a hand to her and the young girl, with Cat behind her, followed by the dogs, tumbled over the threshwood to stand beside her. The animals, sensing the change of atmosphere, recognising the laughter and easing of tension, wagged their tails, eddying about Reed and his Bess with no sign of their former enmity.

  “This is Phoebe. She will stay with us now."

  “Will she indeed?" Reed scarcely looked at the plain child, his eyes reluctant to leave the golden burnished loveliness, the radiant smiling good humour of the woman who minutes earlier had struck him in the face. He had no conception of the expression which softened his own, arrogant, compelling features and the line of his well-cut, sensuous mouth. The joy in him was an emotion he had never known before and because of it, he had not yet learned to hide it. For that sweet and special moment, that laughter-filled, bewitched moment, his relief made him careless and he lifted his hand, needing to touch her, to put an enquiring tender finger to her chin or cheek, to tuck behind her ear a wild and curling tendril of her hair. She was looking down at the girl, her own expression gentle and she did not see it, but Phoebe did and the tension, the fear, the wariness she was to know with most men, fell away, for this man would never harm this woman. Phoebe was no more than a young inexperienced girl, but she had been brought up in a harsh world where love, or affection, was scarce and therefore because of its rarity, she was quick to recognise it. It was there, warm, strong, unbreakable, between Annie and her child. A natural love, protective and maternal, but this was different. The same, but not the same. She had never seen it between a man and a woman but, because at that moment he was making no effort to hide it, it was instantly recognisable.

  “You seem to attract stray young things to you, Annie Abbott," he said musingly, his eyes twinkling with his rare good humour. "What are you to do with this one?" He winked at Phoebe, who hung her head and drew patterns on the grass with her foot, not awfully sure what to make of it.

  “She will be invaluable to me, won't you Phoebe? We'll help one another. She needs a home. I need a . . . friend. I have not many of those and she and Cat will be company for one another when I'm not here. She is already a great help to me, look. I am teaching her to make swill baskets . . ."

  “So I see. And do her talents run to fetching me a tankard of ale, that is if your establishment has such a thing? And if you feel the need to pour it over my head, I will quite understand.”

  They smiled at one another. They knew it would not last, this accord, this lightening and melting of their equally strong and wilful spirits. There was between them an unacknowledged affinity, a magnet which drew them together, whether it be in anger or fascination, a pulling towards each other of their senses which seemed to have the capacity to flare into an instant and flowing pleasure the moment they met. They did not want it, either of them, but a need, a compulsion in him drew an immediate response from her, a female thing which recognised that need and rushed to satisfy it. Her loveliness, her spirit, her defiant rebelliousness towards those who would have sent her packing, her humour, but most of all her vulnerability, called out to the male in him, bringing forth an emotion he had never before known. The need to protect, to cherish, to nourish. All these things lay between them, soft, tender and as yet fragile, but hidden beneath them was a raw and fierce desire to know, in all its glory, the sensual love which can bind together a man and a woman with bonds which are unbreakable. It was in his eyes, narrowed and watchful, even as they smiled, and in the answering curve of her parted lips. It was trembling in the air about them, muted now and subdued in the presence of the child and young girl, but ready to become clamorous and swelling with their ardour should they find themselves alone.

  They sat together on the drystone wall whilst he drank the tankard of ale Phoebe brought him. The sunshine fell warm and benevolent about them. The air was pure and sweet. The wild flowers grew willy-nilly in a great profusion about them, and in every crack and crevice of the wall, filling their nostrils with a heady perfume which can only come with spring. The grass, greening and thickening in the field, was tufted with primroses and cowslips and behind them, standing against the old farmhouse for as long as the building itself, the great hawthorn tree showed the first signs of its golden bronze foliage. Up on the mountain pasture, the ewes and their lambs, returned there after lambing to await 'clipping' in July, called anxiously to one another, and high in Annie's coppice, a cuckoo sang. Larks wheeled in the deep blue of the sky above them, their song vying with that of the cuckoo and Annie and Reed held their breath and their own sharp tongues so as not to disturb this sudden lovely peace which had surprisingly overtaken them.

  They talked of this and that. The troubles in Ireland where it was thought rebellion would take place, a disaffection of the people, many of whom lived in misery and privation, predisposing large masses of them to rise up against it. The potato blight of several years ago had been repeated, the crops ruined and the people starving, so could you wonder at the unrest which prevailed there and the influx of the hundreds of thousands of starving Irish beggars who were leaving to escape it, many of them to the north of England.

  There was also trouble in France, rebellion again amongst the poor and destitute, where it was said Louis Philippe, King of the French, the 'Citizen King' as he was called, was in danger of losing his head as a Louis before him had done, and last month here in England, Feargus O'Connor, leader of the Chartist movement, had declared his intention of marching across Westminster Bridge at the head of what was to have been a peaceful protest, to lay his beloved Charter at the feet of Parliament. A pilgrimage it was to have been, involving 200,000 men from every part of the country and with so many involved, surely it would be bound to succeed. One man, one vote and a secret ballot was not a lot to ask for, surely, among the six points of the People's Charter?

  But it was illegal for more than twenty people at one time to present a petition to the House of Commons. Of the 200,000 who were expected, nowhere near that many turned up for where was an out-of-work weaver or collier to get the fare to travel from Bradford or White-haven to London? There was no march. Those who did get there discovered no grand banners, nor bands to play them in and the confusion was appalling when the barricades erected by the police, expecting violence, were come up against. Special constables guarded every corner. There were many soldiers deployed and when at last those who got through arrived at the House of Commons, it all came to nothing, deflating like a pricked balloon.

  “Will they not get what they ask for?" Annie's face was alive with interest and concern, for it seemed to her, had she been a man, one who could find no work and no hope of feeding his children, she would have marched on bare and bleeding feet all the way to London to demand it. It also seemed to her that this Chartism had a great deal in its favour if it helped the vast mass of men and women who had no voice anywhere in this great land, to speak up and be heard.

  “Not this year they won't, nor next if the men of property have their way."

  “Like yourself you mean. You have a vote I presume."

  “I have, though the young men who march up and down in military formation do not believe I should, or if I have it, so should they. They will not let it rest, those who call themselves the 'physical force'. They will continue t
o meet and shout for Justice and Democracy even though they were defeated and sent scurrying home with their tails between their legs last month, and eventually, I suppose, they will get what they ask for. A vote for every man over the age of twenty-one . . ."

  “And women?"

  “Women? What about women?" He turned to look at her enquiringly, his mind and senses bemused by the way the sunlight tangled in her bright hair, streaking the copper with gold. It curled vigorously about her head, a great chrysanthemum halo which she had attempted to plait but which, with a life of its own, tumbled and twisted across her shoulders and down her back. She had tied a scrap of bright green ribbon about it, dragging it back from her forehead but it only served to enhance the fine, creamy pearl smoothness of her skin, the fierce dip of her golden brown eyebrows and the deep brown concern in her eyes which refused to believe that men should have a vote and women should not.

  “What about women! Our brains are as capable as yours of choosing a man, or even a woman . . ." she grinned gleefully, ". . . yes, even a woman to serve us in Parliament. A woman who would know what we need . . .”

  He began to smile. A short barking laugh burst from him in sheer and absolute amusement at her effrontery, her wayward and foolish effrontery, since the very idea of a woman having any voice in anything, let alone the running of the country, was so madly absurd that he took her to be joking.

  She was not. Her bright face darkened ominously and she jumped down from the wall, her short skirt swinging gracefully about her calves. She reached for the empty tankard which swung idly in his hand and, tossing her wild gypsy hair back from her shoulders she squared up to him somewhat in the manner of a pugilist who has just climbed into the ring.

  “What is there to laugh about, Reed Macauley? Why should I not have a vote like you? I am expected, in view of the fact that I have no man to do it for me, to support myself and my child, and I am not the only woman who is forced to it. I have seen them on my travels, wives separated from their husbands by war or other misfortune, deserted when their men go off, as men do, to fight in some God-forsaken place in the Empire. They have no choice but to work and decide their own lives and though many of them can't do it and end up on the Poor Law, many succeed in wresting some sort of living .. ."