All the dear faces Read online

  The farmhouse and its surrounding acres had been in his family for generations, he was not awfully sure how many. Unlike many small farmers who had been forced off the common land with the Enclosure movement, his grandfather, or was it his great-grandfather, had managed by dint of great hardship to himself and his family to buy the land which had been freely held by the Abbotts, or so they had imagined, from time immemorial. Not a great deal by the standards of the wealthy landowners such as the Macauleys but still theirs, and though they had never managed to do more than 'hang on' from harvest to harvest and from lambing to lambing, it was still theirs. Still Abbott land. Joshua Abbott's land and if he could just get himself a son to pass it on to he'd die a happy man.

  The girl sat down beside him and Joshua's sheepdog crept up to her, leaning fondly on her shoulder, eyeing the oatcake she had taken from the basket.

  “An' don't let me see tha' feedin' that dog."

  “No, Faither."

  “Ruined he is an' all because of tha' mollycoddlin' ways.

  See, woman, tek 'im down wi' thi' an' fasten 'im to t' chain in t' yard. I don't know what comes over the two o' you, pettin' 'im like he was some lap dog. A workin' dog he is an' when he's not workin' he stays in t' yard. Is that clear?"

  “Yes, Faither."

  “Yes, Joshua."

  “Did tha' fetch me ale, woman?"

  “Yes, Joshua, 'tis in t' basket."

  “Well, then, there's no need for thi' to hang about here, is there. There's bound ter be summat for thi' ter do in tha' kitchen."

  “Yes, Joshua," and, obedient as a trained animal, his wife moved off in the direction of the farmhouse which stood slightly lower down the sloping field so that its roof was on a level with where the man and the child laboured.

  “Don't forget bloody dog, woman.”

  His wife turned in a flurry, her face anguished at her own foolishness. What was she thinking of ? Daydreaming, he'd say, though her dreams were not dreams at all but galloping worries on how she was to manage the next four months with the burden she carried . . . oh, please God, don't let me lose this one . . . I must not give way to despair . . . but a boy, a healthy boy so that he will leave me alone. So that he will cast off the bitterness and harshness he shows to the girl, smile a little . . . all that work the child does and her not twelve yet .. . all that I do .. .

  It was hard to believe that she had once been pretty Lizzie Bowman from Cockermouth since those who had known her then could not remember it and her own child had never seen her other than timid, hard-working, patient, dumb, thin and anxious of face, her skin and hair a uniform greyish-brown. She was thirty-four years old. Her life and that of her daughter was one of unremitting labour from early dawn until they fell into their beds at dark. A hard life which was restricted not just to herself and Annie but was the lot of farm women everywhere in Cumberland. There was the clapbread to be baked, the ale to be brewed, pickling and bottling, baking, cooking and cleaning, rush making, cheese and butter making, the pickling of beef and mutton, the drying of the meat in the smoke of the chimney. There was washday when water must be brought from the spring ready for boiling. There was the vegetable garden, the herb garden and when all that was done there was the spinning of the yarn from the fleece of Joshua Abbott's Herdwick sheep and the weaving of it into the hodden-grey wool from which most of their serviceable clothing was made. She and her daughter milked cows and collected eggs, killed the pig, salted the meat and wrung the necks of chickens. They fed the cattle wintering in the cow shed. In the light of the rush lamps they themselves had made they all three knitted hosiery, fashioned birch-twig besoms and swill baskets to be sold at the next market. They both worked like men at lambing time, cut peat and stacked it for drying, helped at the 'boon clip' and at backend, as winter approached, helped to bring down the flock from the high fells and the moors to the lower 'inlands' which were fenced by dry-stone walls.

  Between the three of them, with the occasional help of Natty Varty who hired himself out as casual labour, they ran the farm of Browhead and now, with the growing child within her, already she was beginning to tire before the day was half-way through. She needed to rest, put her feet up now and again with a nice hot cup of tea to steady her but how was she to manage that with the hundred and one jobs that were to be done every day on the farm? You'd think with him being so desperate to have a living son he'd find some way to get her a bit of help but no, she must work just the same, just as hard and just as long and if anything happened to the unborn child it would be her fault.

  The dog, she musn't forget the dog, but in her effort to appease her husband, to keep him from venting his spleen on the child, from becoming more irritable than he already was, she lunged awkwardly, tripping on the long skirt of her grey woollen dress. She righted herself but in doing so she knew she was going to step heavily on Joshua's sturdy potato plants and though it would do them no harm since the potatoes ready for lifting were still deep in the soil, she had a horror of arousing his uncertain temper. The child in her womb fluttered feebly and, unbalanced, with her hand on her belly, she fell heavily. She was up again at once, as light as a feather rises, smiling to let him see there was no harm done, though the awful, familiar sinking in her womb told her it was too late.

  “Tha's a clumsy beggar," he said, the ale he was slurping down his long, muscular throat making him good humoured.

  “I know, Joshua, that's me. Well, I'll get meself home then," turning, desperate to get to her kitchen, to sit down, to lie down in an effort to hold on to what she carried.

  “Tha's goin' wi'out dog now, woman. Bloody hell, it beats me how tha' manages ter get through t'day. Tha's in a maze half the time."

  “Tha's right, Joshua." She had the dog now, leading him by the scruff of his neck until she reached the gate which led into the yard, flapping at the anxious animal with her apron until he was through. She chained him to the wall, even managing to tell him to 'be a good boy, then' whilst all the while the liquid flowed down her leg and into her wooden-soled clogs as the child she carried drained away from her on a tide of blood.

  “I'm sorry, lass," she said later to her daughter who, being a child brought up on a farm, though she was only eleven years old, knew exactly what had happened to her mother five months ago when she had conceived in the bedroom next to hers, and understood the miscarriage she had just suffered in the very same bed.

  “It's all right, Mother. Me an' Faither'll manage," Annie answered stoically.

  “But how's tha' to do that, child, wi' me stuck up here in me bed? Tha' can't do milkin' an' butter an' cheese an' tha' faither'll want them ter go ter market at week's end."

  “Mrs Mounsey'll help me."

  “Aye, " sighing weakly. "An' 'appen I'll be up afore long.”

  And so she was, for Joshua was not a man to sit with his knife and fork in his hands waiting for his supper and the girl was too busy in the fields and the dairy to be of much use in the kitchen. He said nothing, not even in recrimination, when it became apparent he was not to have his son, at least this time, and when in the next eighteen months his wife, despite his nightly assault on her, failed to conceive he began to realise, and to accept that Annie was to be all that he would have. His bitterness was intense and he eyed Jem Mounsey's lad with a jealous loathing he found hard to contain.

  It was the day before Annie Abbott's twelfth birthday that he dropped his bombshell, though he gave no reason for his decision since that was not his way. He knew why he was taking this course of action and that was enough.

  Annie and her mother, their fingers busy with the rushlights they were making in readiness for the long winter nights ahead, froze in their seats when he spoke, their mouths falling open in astoundment.

  “Tha's ter go ter school, girl. Next week. Mornings. Jem Mounsey's lasses go so you might as well an' all.”

  Annabelle Abbott, Joshua and Lizzie Abbott's fifth child, stood up and the rushes she was coating with mutton fat fell to the floor as
Joshua, slinging his hat to his head, set off for The Bull in Gillthrop without another word.

  She found her voice at last. "Does he mean it, Mother?"

  “Tha' faither never ses owt he don't mean, Annie."

  “But . . . why?”

  Lizzie looked at her daughter, marvelling for the hundredth time on how she and Joshua, despite her own subdued prettiness as a girl, could have between them made a child quite as bright and lovely as Annie. What ancestor had bequeathed to her that look of a thoroughbred, of pedigree that neither the Bowmans of Cocker-mouth nor the Abbotts of Gillthrop had in their line? Tall she was, already half a head above other girls of her age and though she was far from plump the flesh on her was firm and without blemish apart from the endearing scatter of pale golden freckles across her nose. Lizzie cut her hair regularly since her father said it was unsightly to have it `all over the bloody place' — his words — but it was thick and springing, a mass of corkscrew curls which stood in a cheerful tangle about her well-shaped head. A bright copper, depending on the light, sometimes russet but, when the sun caught it, so vivid it hurt the eye to behold. It fell about her white neck and ears and over her eyes no matter how often Lizzie hacked it off and she knew it would not be long before Joshua ordered her to bind it up in a length of cloth. There was just so much of it, and then there were her eyes. Deep and enormous, bright with intelligence in her pointed face, almost the same colour as her hair sometimes and at others a pale golden brown which could have been yellow. They were set between lashes which were long and thick, brown at their roots and tipped with gold. Her eyebrows were fine and delicate and her skin was the colour of the buttermilk Lizzie produced in her dairy. She was cheerful, good-humoured and willing, as yet unspoiled by her father's oppression. All flame and brilliance and would it be quenched one day when she was wed to some stolid labouring chap which she knew Joshua hoped to get for her in the absence of a son? Mind, she had a stubborn streak in her which Joshua did his best to curb, succeeding so far, for the child was young, but it could become wilful and when it did what would happen to Lizzie Abbott who would be caught in the middle of it? How would she survive?

  The girl had begun to twirl, her skirts clinging to her slender legs, her bare feet stamping on the flagged floor of the kitchen. She was going to school, she exulted, she was going to school. For some reason known only to her father she was to be sent to school. She would learn. She would be able to read and write and be somebody for was not an education the key which opened the door to all the dreams she had ever dreamed? She would be a scholar, as good as them up there at Long Beck where her status in life had given Mrs Macauley the right to hit Annie Abbott's mother as though she was nothing but a dog.

  Though she could not have said why, nor even tried for she was not quite twelve years old, the picture of the tall and haughty figure of Reed Macauley on his fine black mare moved stealthily across her enchanted, simmering mind.

  Chapter2

  Annie Abbott was not quite fifteen years old when she fell ecstatically in love with the handsome young actor in the travelling company which played at the splendid theatre recently built in Keswick. The year was 1843 and the play was The Outlaw of Sicily in which the handsome young actor had the leading role.

  On that day Sally and Mim Mounsey were picking blackberries in the lane which led from Browhead to Upfell where their father farmed.

  “A nice blackberry 'n' apple tart, that's what tha' lad needs ter pick up 'is appetite, " their worried mother had said at breakfast time. "Tha' knows 'ow our Davy do like a blackberry 'n' apple tart an' wi' a dab o' cream from that lot I've just put in t' crock it'll slide down a treat.”

  Davy Mounsey's strange lack of appetite this last day or two had been a source of mystery to his mother and an irritation to his father who could not abide a 'finicky lad' and especially one who said he 'hurt all over' and could not get out of his bed. A bit flushed he was and not his usual self but it was the Tup Fair at the weekend and how was Jem to get his lambs to Keswick and the tup he meant to hire, back again without the help of his son, he beseeched his wife to tell him?

  “'E'll be right as rain by then, you'll see," she answered stoutly, more to reassure herself than Jem. "I'm mekkin' 'im up an infusion of angelica. Sally gathered me some from t' woods, didn't tha' lass, an' wi' a cupful o' that inside 'im 'e'll soon pick up. A rare good tonic is angelica an' it settles the stomach. 'E'll soon 'ave 'is appetite back. 'E needs a bit o' summat tasty inside 'im . . “

  Aggie Mounsey's cure for all ills was a `bit o' summat tasty' and a good swig of one of her herbal remedies. "That blackberry 'n' apple tart'll do the trick, you just wait an' see if it don't," she added hopefully.

  Sally and Mim, quarrelling half-heartedly as they always did, more from habit than ill-feeling, had reached the gate to Browhead having picked indolently for the whole of the October morning at a speed which would have incensed Joshua Abbott. Both big girls, Sally the same age as Annie, Mim a year younger, but in his opinion allowed to do as they liked by the indulgent Jem. As long as they helped their mother when she needed it in the dairy or the kitchen, or in any task she set them such as the blackberry picking, their father didn't concern himself overmuch with how they did it or how long it took providing it suited his Aggie. Good-natured, the lot of them, feckless Joshua would have said, but Upfell farm thrived where Browhead did not so how to explain it? He could not, unless it was his own lack of a son. He did not consider the almost inhuman amount of work his own daughter did each day worth mentioning.

  She was trudging up the lane from Hause drawing the sledge which Joshua had made behind her, the harness about her shoulders, the leather straps cutting into her flesh and thrusting forward the young swell of her breasts. She leaned into it, her clogged feet feeling the track for purchase since the load on the sledge was heavy. Her face was dewed with sweat and it soaked the armpits of her shabby grey bodice. Her hair was tied up in a length of cloth, allowed to grow now that it was covered, drawn back severely from her pinched face and braided about her head which the cloth covered. On the sledge were two enormous sacks of milled grain which she had just collected from the miller in Hause.

  She stopped when she saw Mim and Sally, her breath scraping from her lungs in great heaving gasps, and drawing off the harness she threw herself down on the grass verge, wiping her face with the sleeve of her bodice.

  “Watch out fer me faither, Sal, will tha'? I'll 'ave to 'ave a breather. Them straps are cuttin' inter me summat cruel. Look . . ." She pushed down the neck of her bodice and on her white flesh were two bright red weals from her shoulders to under her armpits and both sisters drew back in horror.

  “Eeh Annie, them's nasty. Can tha' faither not fetch grain 'imself. That there load's too 'eavy fer a lass."

  “Try telli' 'im that, Sally. 'Tha's a big girl now, our Annie,' 'e ses ter me, besides, 'e's up rakin' fells for t' sheep an' 'asn't time. Me mother offered ter come wi' me but yer know 'ow it is wi' 'er.”

  Oh, aye, they all knew how it was with Lizzie Abbott, poor soul. Sad, oppressed Lizzie Abbott who, with her daughter, led the most miserable of lives. A life on the level of an animal, their mother said indignantly though there was nothing she could do about it. And like an animal Lizzie bred every year, or had done until three years ago when her overworked body had given up the struggle and simply refused to conceive again. She had strained at every task her husband put her to, overburdened and doing her best to protect her child, taking jobs from her which were beyond the child's strength but now it was the other way around as Annie grew tall, taller than Lizzie and though slender to the point of leanness, strong.

  They chatted for a while, the three girls, sitting on the sun-warmed grass verge, idly eating the blackberries Sally and Mim had picked. The sweat dried on Annie's face but it was very noticeable that she was not relaxed, that her head constantly swivelled from side to side, her eyes on the look-out for her father who could, though he never hit her, reduce her to trembl
ing, rebellious fear, calling her a lazy young varmint, his words cold, his jibing voice filled with his contempt, his hard nature venting his spite on her for his lack of a son. She who was a mere girl. She knew he was up on the fell but the habit of a lifetime was so strong in her she could not throw it off but must have eyes in the back of her head on guard for his silent approach.

  “We're goin' ter Keswick, me an' Mim, ter see the players. I don't suppose there's any chance tha' can come wi' us?" Sally put a good-hearted hand on Annie's bare brown arm just where it disappeared into her sleeve. The difference, as the sleeve rose a little at Sally's touch, in the skin which had been exposed to the sun and that which had been covered, was startling. A deep honey colour suddenly becoming a pure, alabaster white. Her face was the same, and her throat, but where the open neck of her bodice began it became an almost translucent white. She worked in the open fields or on the fells for much of the day, every day, when she wasn't at school and the constant exposure to sun and wind, to the wild elements which more often than not prevailed in the Lakeland district was, as she remarked mournfully to her mother —for who wanted to look like an old man when you were going on fifteen — making her as weather beaten as her father.

  Annie laughed shortly. "Don't be daft, Sal. How can I get away from t' farm? Faither knows where I am every minute o' t' day an' night. Besides, even if I could get away, which I can't, where would I get money fer such a thing?"

  “It's only threepence ter stand at back, Annie." "Maybe, but it might as well be three guineas 'cos I 'aven't got it."

  “What about tha' mother? 'Asn't she got a bit put by?" as her mother had, for the egg and butter money was traditionally the perquisite of the farmwife since she did the work.